CooliBlade has joined HEPoCo, a three-year research consortium on high-efficiency power conversion, coordinated by LUT University with Tampere University as research partner and part of Danfoss's Fossil Free Future Veturi programme. Our part of it is cooling. Kick-off was held in Tampere on 26 August.
SiC and GaN switch fast enough to shrink the magnetics, and that shrinks the converter around them. Total losses drop. The losses that remain sit in a smaller volume with less surface area to reject them through, so heat flux at the module rises even as efficiency improves. Past a certain point the converter is limited by how fast heat can be removed, not by the semiconductor.
That is the constraint CooliBlade NEOcore was built for. We run a three-year development project of our own, NEOcore NXT, funded by Business Finland, building cooling for the SiC and GaN modules arriving over the next few years rather than years after they reach the market. The consortium puts that work in the same room as the people designing the converters those modules go into.
"SiC and GaN change what the cooling has to do. Working alongside the converter designers means we can build the thermal path while the converter around it is still being designed, which is a much shorter loop than waiting for the module to reach the market and solving the heat problem afterwards.
Kimmo Jokelainen, CTO and co-founder, CooliBlade
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