Abstract
This article presents a systematic power stage design approach for a high-power density air-cooled inverter, which involves the utilization of emerging 1.7 kV silicon carbide (SiC) mosfet bare die engineering samples, heatsinks optimized with genetic algorithm, and built using three-dimensional printing technology and integrated power modules with a novel packaging structure. The developed air-cooled inverter assembly is mainly composed of the SiC mosfet phase leg modules with split high-side and low-side switch submodules, which are attached to two separate heatsinks for increased heat dissipation area and reduced thermal resistance. The heatsink is designed using a co-simulation environment with finite element analysis in COMSOL and genetic algorithm in MATLAB. The primary design procedure, including bare die device characterization, loss calculation, thermal evaluation, and power module development, is elaborated. The proposed design approach is verified and validated through experiments at each stage of development. The experimental results show that the inverter California Energy Commission efficiency is 98.4%, and a power density of 75 W/in3 is achieved with a sufficient junction temperature margin for semiconductor long-term reliability.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 8821419 |
| Pages (from-to) | 6256-6265 |
| Number of pages | 10 |
| Journal | IEEE Transactions on Industry Applications |
| Volume | 55 |
| Issue number | 6 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 1 2019 |
Funding
This work was supported by the SunShot National Laboratory Multiyear Partnership (SuNLaMP) program, DOE Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO), under a contract with UT Battelle, LLC. This article has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The U.S. government retains and the publisher, by accepting the article for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a nonexclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, worldwide license to publish or reproduce the published form of this article, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan. (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan). Manuscript received October 10, 2018; revised January 9, 2019 and June 17, 2019; accepted August 10, 2019. Date of publication August 29, 2019; date of current version October 18, 2019. Paper 2018-SECSC-0982.R2, presented at the 2018 IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition, San Antonio, TX, USA, Mar. 4–8, and approved for publication in the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS by the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Conversion Systems Committee of the IEEE Industry Applications Society. This work was supported by the SunShot National Laboratory Multiyear Partnership (SuNLaMP) program, DOE Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO), under a contract with UT Battelle, LLC. (Corresponding author: Zhiqiang Wang.) Z. Wang is with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074, China (e-mail: [email protected]).
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| SunShot National Laboratory | |
| UT-Battelle | DE-AC05-00OR22725 |
| U.S. Department of Energy | |
| Battelle | |
| Solar Energy Technologies Office |
Keywords
- Finite element analysis (FEA)
- genetic algorithms (GAs)
- heatsink
- silicon carbide (SiC)
- three-dimensional (3-D) printing