A Novel Thermal Management Method for Enhancing the Consistency of IGBT Heat Stress in Converter
Yanyong Yang, Yang Wu, Xiaofeng Ding, Pinjia Zhang
Abstract
The reliability of power electronic devices and converters is closely related to thermal stress. However, the research on insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) heat balance in the converter is still insufficient. To address this problem, a novel thermal management method for enhancing the consistency of IGBT heat stress in a converter is proposed in this article. A converter-level method based on the bus voltage ringing is utilized for the IGBT junction temperature monitoring. The IGBT power loss can be controlled by modulating the switching frequency, thus IGBT temperature can be adjusted to improve the IGBT thermal consistency of the converter. The validity of the proposed method is verified by experiments with unbalanced load and unbalanced thermal impedance for a three-phase inverter. Besides, the transient process and steady-state performance with asynchronous switching frequency are demonstrated. The method proposed can enhance the thermal consistency effectively and be promising for improving the reliability of the converter with little effect on the performance.