Cool Breakthrough: Hirschvogel makes an impact with Innovative cooling Technology
As part of Renault’s “Power Electronic Box” project – a new generation of traction inverters – we have secured the contract to supply the “Flex Cooling Power Module”, our innovative heat sink concept. This milestone marks Hirschvogel’s entry into a new business area, namely heat sinks for traction inverters in battery-electric vehicles.
Inverters convert the battery’s direct current into alternating current for the drive motor. Efficiency and performance are significantly improved using the heat sink from Hirschvogel. The reason for this is an innovative cooling structure featuring parallel fluid flow through the individual fin stacks and additional highly functional structural elements. Hirschvogel is currently the only supplier on the market to offer a cold-forged solution in this form.
The advantages over conventional heat sinks:
- consistent cooling of all semiconductors for maximum service life
- optimized geometric elements that reduce thermal peaks
- half the pressure loss compared to a classic homogeneous fin stack
With their new design, our heat sinks ensure efficient heat dissipation even in tight assembly spaces, enabling robust and scalable series production solutions that guarantee high-performance cooling even as power densities in modern traction inverters continue to rise in future.
The design of the innovative heat sinks is specific to each order. Working closely with the customer and our Development team, we generate various geometric designs, evaluate them using CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) simulations, and then produce them as forged and machined series-equivalent parts.
Picture: CFD simulation to calculate cooling performance – velocity of the coolant
The first series-equivalent part phases for the “Renault heat sink” have been successfully completed. Series production will take place at our site in China. We are delighted to be taking another step toward the mobility of the future together with our customer.