Active thermal management for a single-phase H-Bridge inverter employing switching frequency control

A thermal controller can be employed to reduce the thermal swing consequent to power cycling. This is demonstrated in this work for a full bridge inverter without a priori knowledge of the mission profile to which the converter is a subsystem, with the objective to reduce the thermal cycling without measurement of the junction temperature. The performance of the thermal controller is experimentally demonstrated by comparing a system, which operates with constant switching frequency with a system equipped with differently tuned thermal controllers. The impact of active thermal control on lifetime is investigated.