Transient modelling of loss and thermal dynamics in power semiconductor devices

The dynamical behavior of temperature is becoming a critical design consideration for the power electronics, because they are referred as “thermal cycling” which is the root cause of fatigues in the power electronics devices, and thus is closely related to the reliability of the converter. It is well understood that the loading of power devices are disturbed by many factors of the converter system like grid, control, environment, etc., which emerge at various time-constants. However, the corresponding thermal response to these disturbances is still unclear, especially the transient behaviors until achieving the steady-state. As a result, a systematic modelling approach is proposed in this paper, which includes the large signal models of the converter system with both electrical and thermal parts, and the corresponding transient models under frequency domain are also extracted. Based on the proposed models, the bandwidths of the loss or thermal response to major disturbances in the converter system can be analytically mapped, enabling more advanced tools to investigate the transient characteristics of loss and thermal dynamics in the power electronics devices.