Numerical study of a liquid metal heat spreader for power semiconductor devices

This paper describes a new thermal management approach for cooling of power semiconductor devices. This new approach is based on a liquid metal fluid flow in order to spread the heat and evacuate it to the ambient. The work presented in this paper is considered as a first step to design and realize a liquid metal heat spreader (LMHS) for power electronics devices. In the first part of the paper, the geometry of a LMHS is described. In the second part, a fully multiphysics numerical study is presented. In order to demonstrate the advantage of the liquid metal heat spreader, a thermal performances comparison with a copper spreader (having the same external dimensions) is presented in the last part of this paper. First results show that the thermal resistance of the system could by reduced by about 40% using this new cooling solution.