Thermal Management Approaches for Power Electronic Building Blocks and Power Corridors

This paper presents an overview of thermal management solutions that are being investigated for power electronic building blocks and their integration into power corridors, both of which are seen as enablers of flexible and reconfigurable power distribution systems in the next generation Navy ships. Air, liquid, two-phase, and indirect cooling approaches are discussed in the context of specific building block configurations built and designed at CPES (Virginia Tech). The paper concludes with an overview of ongoing efforts towards the design, construction, and testing of technology prototypes.