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Device Agnostic Intelligent Gate Driver for Condition Monitoring of Power Devices in AC Drives

Abstract:

The reliability of power electronic converters is an important area of concern due to their increased use in many safety-critical and mission-critical applications. Condition monitoring of power electronic converters is crucial to plan for wear-out failures in advance and to ensure their availability. Power devices such as silicon (Si)-based metal oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs), insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs), and silicon carbide (SiC)-based MOSFETs are widely used as switching devices in medium power level converters. These devices are controlled by gate drivers which take low power signal as input and generate high current signal to operate the power devices. In this paper, a device agnostic intelligent gate driver for industrial ac drives is proposed. It can extract precursor parameters such as collector-emitter threshold voltage and on-state resistance for IGBTs, and on-state resistance for silicon and silicon carbide MOSFETs to monitor its health. The major advantages of the proposed methodology are its ability to capture the device current samples from load current and its ability to differentiate device degradation into chip degradation and package degradation. Another notable feature is that it can work with low sampling rates of less than 1 kHz. The effectiveness of the proposed method to extract various device degradation related parameters is demonstrated through simulation results and experiments.