New Technique To Cool Hybrid Cars Devised

[MikeCR-Z]

New Technique To Cool Hybrid Cars Devised

A group of scientists led by an Indian-American has devised a new technique to cool hybrid cars, PCs, aircrafts and other electronic devices.

They were trying to understand how the fluid overheats in tiny microchannels. The new findings from this Purdue University team will be beneficial in solving the overheating of devices in insulated gate bipolar transistors used in hybrid cars and electric vehicles.

The microchips are used in electric motors to switch large amounts of power from the battery pack to electrical coils needed to accelerate the speed of the vehicle, say zero to 100 km per hour in 10 seconds or less.

According to Suresh Garimella, an engineering professor in Purdue University, it’s utmost important to escalate the huge amount of heat generated in high-powered devices. The high-powered devices are supposed to generate four times as much heat as a conventional computer chip.

"One big question has always been, where is the transition from macroscale boiling to microscale boiling?" said doctoral student and study co-author Tannaz Harirchian.

"How do you define a microchannel versus a macrochannel, and at what point do we need to apply different models to design systems? Now we have an answer."

"We have finally made sense of boiling in small-scale channels and now have a nice understanding of the physics," added Garimella, a B.Tech graduate in mechanical engineering from IIT, Chennai in 1985.

According to the Purdue press release, it was needed to put the electric motors serve as generators to brake the vehicle along with generating power to recharge the battery pack, converting electrical current to run accessories in the vehicle and converting alternating current to direct current to charge the battery from a plug-in line.

The researchers will present the recent findings at the Therminic Conference in Leuven, Belgium on October 8.

Full article here.