skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: An Optimal Design of a Hybrid Liquid/Air Cooling System for High Power, Medium Frequency, and Medium Voltage Solid-State Transformer
In this paper, a 10 kV SiC MOSFET-based solid-state transformer (SST) operating at 13 kV to 7.2 kV, 667 kW, and 20 kHz is modeled and optimized to reach maximum power density and efficiency. In order to reach optimum configuration, different core material/type/size, primary/secondary turns, insulation type/thickness, and cooling systems are considered; then based on a systematic approach the best solution is obtained. To reach this goal, the magnetic part of SST forced air-cooling, and the water-cooling system is modeled in ANSYS MAXWELL/Simplorer, ANSYS-ICEPAK, and ANSYS-FLUENT, respectively. The simulation results show a high efficient SST with an effectiveness of the cooling system.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1939124
PAR ID:
10313562
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
International Symposium for Power Electronics in Distributed Generation Systems
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. In this study, a four-port solid-state transformer (SST) with decoupled control scheme to control the power flow and the output voltage is proposed. The proposed decoupled control scheme controls all of the four ports' powers independently. In addition, the design of the four-port transformer including core material selection and winding placement is investigated. The designed transformer is modeled in ANSYS-Maxwell and also co-simulated with ANSYS-Simplorer. The operating frequency of the system is designed for 100 kHz; therefore, a very compact size is obtained for the entire multi-port converter. The performance of the proposed system is validated throughout MATLAB/Simulink simulation and experimental studies carried out for a 10kW/port SST prototype. The obtained results show that the four-port SST provides an interface for four-different power supplies or loads. It is seen that the proposed decoupled control scheme can control the output voltage at the desired value and track the reference power signals for each port. It provides as well a good steady state and dynamic performance. 
    more » « less
  2. This paper presents the study and evaluation of a medium-voltage grid-tied cascaded H-bridge (CHB) three-phase inverter for battery energy storage systems using SiC devices as an enabling technology. The high breakdown voltage capability of SiC devices provide the advantage to significantly minimize the complexity of the CHB multilevel converter, with less power loss compared to when Silicon (Si) devices are used. The topology in this study has been selected based on high voltage SiC devices. In order to reach 13.8 kV, a nine-level CHB is needed when using 6.5 kV SiC MOSFETs. However, if 10 kV SiC MOSFETs are used, only five-levels of the CHB are required. The controls were developed, simulated and verified through an experimental prototype. The results from the scaled-down prototype proved the controls and the verification of the performance of five-level CHB three-phase inverter. For the system reliability, both open-loop and short-circuit faults are analyzed. 
    more » « less
  3. Forecasting data center cooling demand remains a primary thermal management challenge in an increasingly larger global energy-consuming industry. This paper proposes a dynamic modeling approach to evaluate two different strategies for delivering cold air into a data center room. The common cooling method provides air through perforated floor tiles by means of a centralized distribution system, hindering flow management at the aisle level. We propose an idealized system such that five overhead heat exchangers are located above the aisle and handle the entire server cooling demand. In one case, the overhead heat exchangers force the airflow downwards into the aisle (Overhead Downward Flow (ODF)); in the other case, the flow is forced to move upwards (Overhead Upward Flow (OUF)). A complete fluid dynamic, heat transfer, and thermodynamic analysis is proposed to model the system’s thermal performance under both steady state and transient conditions. Inside the servers and heat exchangers, the flow and heat transfer processes are modeled using a set of differential equations solved in MATLAB™. This solution is coupled with ANSYS-Fluent™, which computes the three-dimensional velocity, temperature, and turbulence on the Airside. The two approaches proposed (ODF and OUF) are evaluated and compared by estimating their cooling effectiveness and the local Entropy Generation. The latter allows identifying the zones within the room responsible for increasing the inefficiencies (irreversibilities) of the system. Both approaches demonstrated similar performance, with a small advantage shown by OUF. The results of this investigation demonstrated a promising approach of data center on-demand cooling scenarios. 
    more » « less
  4. Abstract Data centers have started to adopt immersion cooling for more than just mainframes and supercomputers. Due to the inability of air cooling to cool down recent high-configured servers with higher Thermal Design Power, current thermal requirements in machine learning, AI, blockchain, 5G, edge computing, and high-frequency trading have resulted in a larger deployment of immersion cooling. Dielectric fluids are far more efficient at transferring heat than air. Immersion cooling promises to help address many of the challenges that come with air cooling systems, especially as computing densities increase. Immersion-cooled data centers are more expandable, quicker installation, more energy-efficient, allows for the cooling of almost all server components, save more money for enterprises, and are more robust overall. By eliminating active cooling components such as fans, immersion cooling enables a significantly higher density of computing capabilities. When utilizing immersion cooling for server hardware that is intended to be air-cooled, immersion-specific optimized heat sinks should be used. A heat sink is an important component for server cooling efficacy. This research conducts an optimization of heatsink for immersion-cooled servers to achieve the minimum case temperature possible utilizing multi-objective and multidesign variable optimization with pumping power as the constraint. A high-density server of 3.76 kW was modeled on Ansys Icepak that consists of 2 CPUs and 8 GPUs with heatsink assemblies at their Thermal Design Power along with 32 Dual In-line Memory Modules. The optimization is conducted for Aluminum heat sinks by minimizing the pressure drop and thermal resistance as the objective functions whereas fin count, fin thickness, and heat sink height are chosen as the design variables in all CPUs, and GPUs heatsink assemblies. Optimization for the CPU and the GPU heatsink was done separately and then the optimized heatsinks were tested in an actual test setup of the server in ANSYS Icepak. The dielectric fluid for this numerical study is EC-110 and the cooling is carried out using forced convection. A Design of Experiment (DOE) is created based on the input range of design variables using a full-factorial approach to generate multiple design points. The effect of the design variables is analyzed on the objective functions to establish the parameters that have a greater impact on the performance of the optimized heatsink. The optimization study is done using Ansys OptiSLang where AMOP (Adaptive Metamodel of Optimal Prognosis) as the sampling method for design exploration. The results show total effect values of heat sinks geometric parameters to choose the best design point with the help of a Response Surface 2D and 3D plot for the individual heat sink assembly. 
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    Abstract Earlier studies have proposed many semiempirical relations between climate and tropical cyclone (TC) activity. To explore these relations, this study conducts idealized aquaplanet experiments using both symmetric and asymmetric sea surface temperature (SST) forcings. With zonally symmetric SST forcings that have a maximum at 10°N, reducing meridional SST gradients around an Earth-like reference state leads to a weakening and southward displacement of the intertropical convergence zone. With nearly flat meridional gradients, warm-hemisphere TC numbers increase by nearly 100 times due particularly to elevated high-latitude TC activity. Reduced meridional SST gradients contribute to a poleward expansion of the tropics, which is associated with a poleward migration of the latitudes where TCs form or reach their lifetime maximum intensity. However, these changes cannot be simply attributed to the poleward expansion of Hadley circulation. Introducing zonally asymmetric SST forcings tends to decrease the global TC number. Regional SST warming—prescribed with or without SST cooling at other longitudes—affects local TC activity but does not necessarily increase TC genesis. While regional warming generally suppresses TC activity in remote regions with relatively cold SSTs, one experiment shows a surprisingly large increase of TC genesis. This increase of TC genesis over relatively cold SSTs is related to local tropospheric cooling that reduces static stability near 15°N and vertical wind shear around 25°N. Modeling results are discussed with scaling analyses and have implications for the application of the “convective quasi-equilibrium and weak temperature gradient” framework. 
    more » « less