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Direct Cooled Ceramic Substrate For Thermal Control Of Automotive Power Electronics, Kirk Townsend Lowe

Doctoral Dissertations

As electric vehicle technology develops, manufacturers would like to move toward hotter coolants for power electronic components to reduce system level costs. Thus, unique designs of inverter designs were sought to enable operation with 105°C coolant. The proposed solution in this research incorporated flow channels into the ceramic layer of the direct-bonded copper substrate typically found in power electronic packages. The focus of this research details the design and analysis of the direct cooled ceramic substrate from the perspective of its thermal performance and innovative packaging concept.

The research was directed to pursue alumina as the substrate ceramic because of …

Unique Characteristics Of Liquid Metal Extended Meniscus Evaporation, Joseph Brown Tipton, Jr.

Doctoral Dissertations

The research in this dissertation addresses the steady evaporation of a capillary pore with a liquid metal working fluid. First, the interline region of an extended meniscus thin film is considered for the unique physical case of a liquid metal. A new thin film evaporation model is presented that captures the unsimplified dispersion force along with an electronic disjoining pressure component that is unique to liquid metals. The resulting nonlinear 4th-order ODE is solved using an implicit orthogonal collocation technique along with the Levenberg-Marquardt method. Results show that the electronic component of the disjoining pressure should be considered when modeling …