Power Electronics Cooling of 100 W/cm² Using AC Electroosmotic Pump

The power electronics cooling system should be able to dissipate very high heat flux densities (watts per surface area). For that, many solutions can be used: liquid forced convection, heat pipes, capillary loops, and so on. In the forced convection cooling system case, one of the hotspots is the mechanical pump. We propose in this paper to study the possibility of replacing the conventional mechanical pumps by electroosmotic (EO) pump. The pump based on porous ceramic seems well suited for this application. In this paper, after a few reminders on electroosmosis pumping theory, the new modification of our second prototype will be presented. Then, the test bench and the experiment results of the second prototype with a power electronics device will be presented and discussed. It will be shown that the pump generates 20 ml/min and it is used to evacuate 100 W/cm2of heat flux generated by the power electronics device.