CFD modeling of additive manufacturing liquid cold plates for more reliable power press-pack assemblies

In this work a new concept of liquid cold plate for high power press-pack assemblies is investigated. In industrial applications it is very important to reduce the volume and weight of the device-heatsink stack, in order to improve reliability and availability of the whole system. The potential of aluminum additive manufacturing technology is investigated by means of coupled thermal fluid-dynamic 3D modeling in order to get the best trade-off between thickness, thermal performance, and pressure drop. The validation of the numerical model was conducted by means of thermal characterization of a prototype with a properly built test bench. The numerical model was used to explore different solutions for the cold plate internal layout, such as with classical coils, deformed coils, or specific textures impossible with standard mechanical machining. Early results are shown to demonstrate the usefulness of our coupled thermal fluid-dynamic approach. Mechanical analysis was also taken into consideration, to account for possible weakness induced by the reduction in metal content typical of the advanced structures built with additive technology.