Preserving Converter Lifetime by Active Thermal Boundary Control

The reliability of converters is primarily governed by thermal stress of semiconductor devices. By limiting devices cooling, the proposed control method effectively reduces thermal cycling of the device junction temperatures, ΔT
_j
, improving reliability. To this end, natural switching surface control is utilized for active thermal control (ATC) on the dual active bridge. Electro-thermal semiconductor device modeling provides validation with quantified improvements over conventional ATC methods.