Eventos Anais de eventos
ENCIT 2022
19th Brazilian Congress of Thermal Sciences and Engineering
Numerical modeling of the thermal performance of a hybrid solar inverter
Submission Author:
jeferson Avila Souza , RS , Brazil
Co-Authors:
Otavio Heckler, Marcus Vinicius Alves Pereira, jeferson Avila Souza
Presenter: jeferson Avila Souza
doi://10.26678/ABCM.ENCIT2022.CIT22-0357
Abstract
The increasing usage of electronic devices have improved performance and capabilities of most domestic and industrial equipment. In many applications, they are becoming smaller, more powerful and assembled inside a cabinet with limited volume size. Thermal management of such products is crucial to guarantee high performance under normal operating conditions. Present work numerically investigates the thermal behavior of a hybrid solar inverter subjected to natural convection cooling. Main objective is to calculate temperature gradients inside the cabinet and guarantee that maximum equipment temperature remains below critical values. The solution accounts for a close to real equipment geometry, including the cabinet, circuit board and heat sink (fins) and the major heat sources: IGBTs and inductor. A Finite Volume numerical solution is obtained with the OpenFOAM software, more specifically using the chtMultiRegionFoam solver, while geometry discretization was performed with the snappyHexMesh utility (also included with OpenFOAM software). The model assumes an incompressible flow with constant thermophysical properties and uses the Boussinesq approximation to model the natural convection. Energy equation is solved for both solid and fluid regions. Temperature and velocity profiles, inside the inverter cabinet, were calculated and their influence to the thermal management of the overall system is analyzed. Equipment temperatures (maximum and average) are also investigated for steady state conditions. Results have allowed to identify the domain regions with higher temperatures and/or flow stagnation. These locations indicate the regions where natural convection is ineffective and the positions where the equipment with higher energy dissipation should not be positioned.
Keywords
Natural Convection, Open Source, Thermal management, Numerical simulation, Finite Volumes
