Thermal modelling of a passively cooled inverter for wave power

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.