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A novel cooling geometry for subsea variable speed drives

2020; Elsevier BV; Volume: 185; Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.applthermaleng.2020.116483

1873-5606

Lucas Andrade Militão, Caio Dias Fernandes, Diego dos Santos, Douglas Machado, Marcelo Lobo Heldwein, Carlos R. Rambo, Alexandre K. da Silva, Jader R. Barbosa,

Heat Transfer and Boiling Studies

Experimental and theoretical analyses are conducted to evaluate the passive cooling performance of a novel geometry for subsea variable speed drives, a common piece of equipment in deep-sea oil exploration. Relying on the sea water as a low-temperature thermal reservoir, the new design forms an enclosed, annular space with centrally located modular boards that compose the power electronics inverter. Buoyancy-induced motion of a dielectric coolant conveys the heat dissipated by the electronic boards to the sea water through the outer and innermost walls of the annular enclosure. A thermal network model is implemented and used to optimize the enclosure geometry through a genetic algorithm, which served as a reference for a scaled experimental setup. A Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation of the conjugate heat transfer yielded temperature distributions on the electronic boards and temperature and fluid velocity fields inside the enclosure. A comparison between the experimental data and the modeling results indicated a good agreement, with average RMS deviations of a modified Nusselt number of 7.0% and 8.5% for the thermal network and CFD analysis, respectively. For a 140-W operating point dissipation rate in the scaled test setup, the thermal network and the CFD models presented maximal deviations of 4°C and 2.3°C with respect to the heat sink temperature measurements.