Designing Power Module Health Monitoring Systems Based on Converter Load Profile

This article presents a method for designing converter systems embedding power modules for a specified degradation monitoring performance in real-time applications. It builds upon prior work which identified specific variations in three-dimensional transient heat transfer with interface and interconnect state-of-health. This article contributes a joint, module-converter concurrent design method to quantify opportunities and limits in using chip-based temperature sensing to integrate electrothermal impedance spectroscopy
in situ
. Challenges intrinsic to modules, such as many, closely packed heat sources, are quantified. This article also examines spatial degrees-of-freedom for placing additional degradation sensing temperature detectors. Experimental measurements of transient thermal frequency response show trends that can be exploited to push temperature sensors against their signal-to-noise ratio limits. Overall, the design method relies on circuit topology and modulation details; it is directed toward early-stage converter development. To that end, an included harmonic loss modeling step immediately provides a designer with feedback about the feasibility of a degradation sensing concept.