Coverage Path Planning for Thermal Interface Materials
This addresses the need for more reliable and sustainable thermal management in electric and autonomous vehicles, though it is an incremental improvement over existing automation techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of manually planning dispense paths for Thermal Interface Materials in power electronics by proposing a fully automated optimization approach that outperforms current manual methods, as demonstrated on multiple real automotive products with experimental validation.
Thermal management of power electronics and Electronic Control Units is crucial in times of increasing power densities and limited assembly space. Electric and autonomous vehicles are a prominent application field. Thermal Interface Materials are used to transfer heat from a semiconductor to a heatsink. They are applied along a dispense path onto the semiconductor and spread over its entire surface once the heatsink is joined. To plan this application path, design engineers typically perform an iterative trial-and-error procedure of elaborate simulations and manual experiments. We propose a fully automated optimization approach, which clearly outperforms the current manual path planning and respects all relevant manufacturing constraints. An optimum dispense path increases the reliability of the thermal interface and makes the manufacturing more sustainable by reducing material waste. We show results on multiple real products from automotive series production, including an experimental validation on actual series manufacturing equipment.