Active Thermal Control of a WBG-based AC-DC Converter Using Dynamic Gate-drive for Lifetime Improvement

In this paper, an advanced method for implementing active thermal control is proposed that can be helpful for smoothing repetitive junction temperature swing, which is one of the main reasons for wear-out failure in Wide bandgap (WBG)-based (i.e., SiC) power electronics converters (PEC). Utilizing current-source gate-drive, rise/fall (tON/tOFF) time during switching transition can be controlled, resulting in shaping switching losses in the form that can minimize junction temperature swings. The proposed method is implemented for an AC-DC converter and the simulation results validate the performance of the proposed method. It shows that by reducing junction temperature swing by 7°C, the lifetime of the PEC can be improved by a factor of 2.