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Alstom Drives and Controls has dramatically reduced the cost of developing its Alspa MV3000 variable speed drive whilst also minimising its time to market, using Flotherm thermal management software from Flomerics to design a heat sink capable of cooling high power Insulated Gate Bi-polar Transistors (IGBTs) within the product.
The Alspa MV3000 product required a heat sink capable of dissipating 2.3 kW of heat. Having evaluated a wide range of proprietary heat sinks, the product development team at Alstom, discovered that there were in fact no existing products on the market capable of cooling the IGBTs in the physical space available, and that it would be necessary to design a customised heat sink.
Alstom chose Flomerics and its Flotherm software to model the new design. Having exported an IGES file containing all the relevant geometric design data from Pro/Engineer, Alstom ran 5 simulations in Flotherm for various design configurations against the calculated heat dissipation of the IGBTs to optimise the design of the heat sink on which the IGBTs were placed. By using software to optimise the design of the heat sink and to develop the prototype, rather than the traditional machine-shop methods, Alstom was able to design a completely new heat sink, and reduce the iteration time for each design variant dramatically from a week to just one day, whilst also making considerable savings on machine shop expenses and tooling.
To verify the modelling process, a physical prototype of the final heatsink was manufactured. Due to restrictions on the grades of material available for the prototype heatsink compared to that planned for a production extrusion, a further iteration with material parameters relating to the prototype unit was carried out.
Commenting on the final design, Rod Jones, Alstom, concluded, "When we eventually manufactured a physical prototype, we were delighted to discover that experimental data obtained from the physical model in the laboratory was within 1.2% of the results generated in Flotherm. Using Flotherm in the design process allowed us ultimately to maximise the current density of the IGBTs whilst keeping below temperature limits, thus reducing the risk of overheating, one of the primary causes of electronic equipment failure."
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