Thermal modelling of a passively cooled inverter for wave power

Antoine Baudoin; Cecilia Boström

Thermal modelling of a passively cooled inverter for wave power

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Author(s): Antoine Baudoin ¹ and Cecilia Boström ¹
- Affiliations: 1: Division for Electricity, Uppsala University, Box 534, 751 21, Uppsala, Sweden
Source: Volume 9, Issue 4, May 2015, p. 389 – 395
DOI: 10.1049/iet-rpg.2014.0112 , Print ISSN 1752-1416, Online ISSN 1752-1424

This is an open access article published by the IET under the Creative Commons Attribution License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)

Received 20/03/2014, Accepted 31/10/2014, Revised 16/10/2014, Published 05/01/2015

Owing to very costly maintenance operations, the reliability of electrical systems for offshore renewable energy is a major issue to make electricity production economical. Therefore proper thermal management is essential in order to avoid the components from being damaged by excessive temperature increase. Both analytic and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models were implemented to assess the temperature increase in the inverter installed in a submerged substation and during working conditions. It was shown that this inverter could transmit a total power of up to about 35 kW. This limit is dependent on a certain distance between the modules and a perfect thermal contact with the hull. The influence of several of such parameters as well as the efficiency of passive cooling were studied.

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