Cooling Power Electronic Building Blocks Aboard Navy Ships

Abstract

The Navy Integrated Power and Energy Corridor (NiPEC) is a modular entity that encapsulates all the power handling requirements of a shipboard power and energy distribution system including transmission, conversion, protection, isolation, control and storage. The basic component of the NiPEC is the Power Electronics Building Block (PEBB), which is envisioned to be a universal converter that is programmed for the specific application when installed. The PEBB is a modular unit that can be easily swapped out and is small and light enough to be carried and installed by a single person. One constraint placed on the PEBB to ensure ease of swapping is that no liquid can cross the boundary of the PEBB, thus eliminating the possibility of leaking at the interface.

This thesis describes the design and analysis of a system for removing up to 10 kW of heat from each PEBB in a stack of four PEBB units, using liquid cooling via a dry interface. This is achieved by hard-mounting cold plates in the electronics cabinet, placing the heat-transfer surface of each PEBB adjacent to a cold plate, and improving heat transfer across the interface through the use of a thermal pad. The thesis presents initial thermal and structural analyses using analytical models, computational fluid dynamics and mechanical design tenets. These analyses demonstrate that this is a viable solution to the PEBB cooling problem.