Junction Temperature Control for More Reliable Power Electronics

Abstract

The thermal stress of power electronic components is one of the most important causes of their failure. Proper thermal management plays an important role for more reliable and cost-effective energy conversion. As one of the most vulnerable and expensive components, power semiconductor components are the focus of this paper. Possible approaches to control the semiconductor junction temperature are discussed in this paper, along with the implementation in several emerging applications. The modification of the control variables at different levels (modulation, control, system) to alter the loss generation or distribution is analyzed. Some of the control solutions presented in literature, which showed experimentally that the thermal stress can be effectively reduced, are reviewed in detail. These results are often mission-profile dependent and the controller needs to be tuned to reach the desired cost-benefit trade-off. The paper analyzes also the many open questions of this research area. Among them, it is worth highlighting that a verification of the actual lifetime extension is still missing.

Sampling-Time Harmonic Control for Cascaded H-Bridge Converters With Thermal Control

“…Thermal stress leads to a fatigue of the materials of which the semiconductors are composed. In other words, the reiteration of thermal cycles leads to the expansion and compression of materials which increases the thermal resistance becoming in a non-stop cycle [13]- [15]. This point is well-known in the academia and industry which are focusing their efforts to develop predictive models to obtain the expected remaining power devices lifetime as a function of the suffered thermal cycles [16], [17].…”

“…Active Thermal Control (ATC) is a control strategy which allows the modification of the thermal stress suffered by the modules taking an action over the electrical parameters [15]. Power devices lifetime model estimates the remaining lifetime as a function of cumulated damage which depends on the thermal cycles suffered.…”

Lifetime Analysis of IGBT Power Modules in Passively Cooled Tidal Turbine Converters

“…Reliability of WT converters ranging from the influence of mission profiles to that of reactive power on the lifetime of IGBT modules, and comparison of multilevel converter topologies, and so forth [19,[21][22][23] is also widely studied. Active control of cooling systems, switching frequency and modulation strategies, and power loss redistribution (in case of parallel converters) are some commonly used techniques to improve lifetime in WT converters [24][25][26]. Adding redundancy is another way of improving the overall reliability in WT converters and subsea applications [1,27].…”

Thermal Analysis of Power Semiconductor Device in Steady-State Conditions

“…According to [4], junction temperature distribution is not uniform, the heat transfer to the heatsink being significantly higher on the junction periphery than the heat eliminated from the junction bulk. Junction temperature control solutions for power semiconductor devices are usually depend on a specific task or profile, and the controller has to be adjusted to assure the desired performances [5].…”