Advanced Electric Powertrain Cooling Contributing to Powertrain Efficiency

Authors

Patrick Debal, Wouter Tits, Punch Powertrain, Sint-Truiden, Belgium;
Christoph Massonet; Daniel Kieninger; Jonas Hemsen; Gordon Witham, Institute for Automotive Engineering (ika), RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany;
Dr. Mathias R. Lidberg, Mechanics and Maritime Sciences, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden;
Dr. ir. Henk Huisman, Juris Arrozy, Prof. Dr. E.A. Lomonova, Electromechanics and Power Electronics Group, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands;
Daniel Oeschger, BRUSA Elektronik AG, Sennwald, Switzerland;
Charley Lanneluc, Olivier Tosoni, Commissariat à l'énergie atomique et aux énergies alternatives, CEA, Grenoble, France;
Michael Ernstorfer, MAHLE ZG Transmissions GmbH, Eching, Germany;
Rémi Mongellaz, Simulations and Test Solutions, Siemens Industry Software, S.A.S., Lyon, France

Summary

The cooling system of the ModulED powertrain comprises the cooling of the inverter and the electric motor. To reduce auxiliary power demands, the cooling system development focused on the required flow characteristics for local heat dissipation at the components while maintaining a reasonable pressure drop in the system. The resulting flow paths are a combination of parallel and serial flows within the inverter and the motor housing. Common design problems such as hydraulic balancing of parallel flows as well as trade-offs on local heat transfer versus pressure drop are addressed by hydro-thermal, three-dimensional conjugate heat transfer (3D-CHT) simulations. The simulative methods were applied and an extract of the results is provided in this paper.

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