Investigation of a rectangular heat pipe radiator with parallel heat flow structure for cooling high-power IGBT modules

The thermal management of insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) modules is a critical issue in the field of power electronics. According to the minimum thermal resistance principle, this study proposed a rectangular heat pipe radiator with parallel heat flow structure that can be used for cooling two 1700 V/1000 A IGBT modules. The prototypes of typical and novel heat pipe radiators were produced to validate the heat transfer enhancement of the novel structure. Performance evaluation and analysis were numerically and experimentally carried out, and the numerical results agreed well with the experimental data. Parametric studies were performed to analyze the effects of inlet air temperature, air volume, and heat load on the heat dissipation capability. The study found that the novel heat pipe radiator has a good start-up characteristic due to the parallel heat flow structure. Moreover, the performance enhancement of the novel heat pipe radiator is obvious at large heat loads. Experiment results show that the two IGBT modules with 3500 W could be cooled down to 67.8 °C when the air volume is 450 m3 h−1, which is 8.9% lower than that of a typical heat pipe radiator. The proposed novel structure improves thermal performance of the novel heat pipe radiator by significantly decreasing its thermal resistance by 22% in comparison with that of a typical heat pipe radiator.