Mathematical Modeling and Parametric FEM Study on the Thermal Management of a Rectangular Microchannel Heat Sink

Due to the fast-paced depletion of natural energy resources such as petroleum, more sustainable alternatives, like Electric Vehicles (EVs) are destined to become the new norm. This new demand has increased the amount of research happening in this field, especially with regard to the controllers of the EV, which act as the brain of the operation. Of all the factors that affect the efficiency and functioning of any power electronic system, temperature is the most important. Thermal management should therefore be considered early in the design process. In this discourse, microchannels are considered to be the cooling mechanism applied on a microchannel heat sink system. A mathematical model is proposed based on Finite Element Methods which simplifies the discretization and assembly of parallel and tapered microchannel systems and validates their rates of cooling against similar models constructed using CFD methods. The goal of the study is to obtain a robust mathematical model that can be used to generate data for all attempts at optimizing the cooling rates using combinations of genetic algorithms.