Thermal Management Strategies: Improve Levelized Cost of Energy

Efficient Thermal Solutions for Today’s Energy Landscape

Within the dynamic landscape of the energy sector, challenges of efficiency, scalability, and cost-effectiveness are ever-present. However, among these hurdles, a significant yet often overlooked factor emerges… WASTE HEAT. Energy Engineers need to specify effective thermal management solutions to manage the ever-increasing waste heat loads, while balancing reliability, maintenance, and system level efficiencies. During this webinar, we’ll explore three case studies, comparing traditional cooling methods to emerging technologies designed to provide reliable, cost effective solutions for the energy sector.

First, we’ll explore a simple Medium Voltage Drive (MVD) cabinet. In the oil and gas industry, along with many other industries, MVD systems are designed to adapt motor speed and optimize energy consumption and reduce CO2 emissions for variable load applications. For the oil and gas industry ruggedized solutions and reliability are key to providing high reliability solutions in remote and harsh environments. These solutions need to be readily available to respond to the rapidly fluctuating demands of the industry. In this case study, we’ll explore off-the-shelf-sealed enclosure cooling strategies and how to optimize and customize to meet thermal demands while maintaining a quick implementation cycle and economical cabinet costs.

Next, we’ll explore a wind turbine application, where thermal challenges can extend from ground support equipment up to the nacelle hundreds of feet in the air. Whether you’re rejecting heat from the frictional losses of the gears or managing power electronics in the nacelle, reliability and reduced maintenance become prominent in reducing the lifetime ownership cost of your thermal management solution. Here, we’ll explore Loop Thermosyphon technology and ways to passively reject 10s to 100s of kWs, ideal for remote locations and difficult to service systems.

Finally, we’ll explore the power conversion equipment, focusing on high power inverters that can reject anywhere from 10 to 50kW of waste heat per cabinet. In these applications, liquid cooling is prominent due to the high levels of waste heat load. Adapting a Pumped Two-Phase approach over traditional single phase liquid cooling can provide intrinsic safety benefits, higher power densities and lower required pump power. All these factors support the mission of optimizing LCOE and managing energy efficiency. We’ll explore the benefits and challenges of each liquid cooling strategy with a focus on practical implementation of P2P thermal management.

Learning Objectives:

• Learn to optimize thermal management for energy efficiency.
• Optimizing cooling strategies for ruggedized MVD systems.
• Discover passive thermal management for wind turbines.
• Learn liquid cooling strategies for high-power inverters.