A Si-IGBT-Based Solution to Drive High-Speed Electrical Machines

High-speed electrical drives normally require converters capable of high-frequency operation. For this reason, converters based on SiC mosfets have been spreading in this field. Nevertheless, the problems caused by the high dv/dt imposed by SiC mosfets, like the premature failure of the motor winding insulation and the electromagnetic interference generation, are drawing more and more attention of the experts of this sector. In fact, these issues can deeply affect the system reliability and, hence, can represent a limiting factor for all those applications where the continuity of operation is the highest priority. To avoid the use of SiC mosfets in the most sensitive applications, this paper presents a solution, which consists of a Si-insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT)-based inverter fed by a Si-IGBT-based dc/dc converter performing a suitable dc voltage regulation. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to prove that a stable operation of a high-speed drive can be guaranteed through the proposed converter configuration. To prove the effectiveness of the proposed solution, experimental results on a laboratory setup have been presented.