Heat transfer and critical heat flux for two-phase immersion cooling of an inverter power module

Heat transfer and critical heat flux measurement are reported for pool boiling cooling of the base plate of an inverter power module. Novec 649 is used as refrigerant. Heat fluxes up to 14.6 W/cm² were applied with refrigerant saturation temperatures of 36 °C, 41 °C and 46 °C. The measured boiling curves are comparable to those reported for similar refrigerants. The critical heat fluxes range from 12.1 W/cm² to 14.6 W/cm², which corresponds within 10% to the correlation of Zuber. The critical heat flux is significantly lower than the highest heat fluxes expected from the power module, indicating that methods to increase the critical heat flux are needed to enable two-phase power module cooling