Verification and optimization of the thermal design for the power stack with three IGBT modules

Abstract

Insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) modules play a crucial role in electronic application. The reliability of IGBT modules is challenged severely in solar inverter with the enhancement of power density, which arouses more attention to the heat dissipation under high temperature. The thermal design of power stack is investigated in this paper. A conjugate heat transfer simulation model of the power stack with three IGBT modules which is calibrated by comparing with thermal tests is created. To improve the heat dissipation potential of the module, the correlations between Tj,max among chips of IGBT components within three modules and module spacing are examined. In addition, the influence of design of the heatsink, e.g. fin thickness, fin number, dimension, etc. are analyzed. Heat dissipation can be improved by increasing fin thickness and fin number these two effective ways. In addition, the relationship between Tj,max and the number of fins under different fin thicknesses is explored to optimize the number of heatsink fins and their thickness design.