Cold plates easy design software tool for industrial electronic applications

This work proposes a FEM-SPICE based methodology to design cold plates. Cold plates are an important topic in the field of power electronics, in order to develop reliable applications. Typically the design of custom cold plates is a manual process that forces to build many prototypes in order to find the best solution. Otherwise, Finite Element Method (FEM) analysis is an useful methodology, able to reduce the number of prototypes, but it requires skilled technicians and long simulation studies. Here is suggested a methodology able to assist the design of cold plates with negligible simulation cost, and limited use of FEM simulations and prototypes. POSEICO has developed a new ICP - Integrated Cold Plate (patent pending), that use the proposed methodology during the product design phase. In order to validate the approach, the ICP AWCH-L640W420T24 developed by POSEICO was simulated through FEM study. FEM and SPICE results were compared in order to evaluate the agreement between the two simulation methodologies. The used case study was composed by different fundamental parts (i.e. coil, coupling straight, elbow nipple, etc.). Results shown a good agreement between a cold plate thermal-fluid-dynamics FEM simulation and the SPICE based methodology. The proposed CAE method allows to design the best cold plate solution, to save simulation resources, and to extract necessary data for the datasheet: i) pressure drop; ii) thermal resistance.