Coupled thermal-mechanical analysis of power electronic modules with finite element method and parametric model order reduction

Abstract

This work presents a new approach for performing a parametric study and examining nonlinear material behaviours of a coupled thermal-mechanical model of a Power Electronics Module (PEM) by integrating the Finite Element Method (ANSYS-FEM) with Parametric Model Order Reduction (pMOR). The considered coupling method solves the thermal and structural models concurrently compared to the widely practised sequential coupling method. Instead of constant parameter values, which are generally regarded for pMOR studies, the temperature-dependent material properties of the wire material have been parametrised in the work using the pMOR method. A generalised 2D model has been regarded here for thermal-mechanical analysis with the pMOR approach, parametrising temperature-dependent coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) and Young’s modulus (E) of the wire material to explore their impact on wire bonds. The matrix interpolation method has been applied here for the pMOR study, and PRIMA, a Krylov subspace-based model order reduction (MOR) technique, has been exercised for local model order reductions. A new efficient process of matrix interpolation, based on the Lagrange interpolation technique, has been developed to implement matrix interpolation in the parametric reduced order model (pROM). The local reduced order models (ROMs) have a degree of freedom (DOF) of just 8, compared to the full-order models’ (FOMs) of 50,602. The pROM provides an excellent solution and reduces computational time by 84% for the presented case.