Veranstaltung  /  21. September 2021  -  22. September 2021

ECPE Tutorial: Thermal Engineering of Power Electronic Systems Part I: Thermal Design and Verification

Fraunhofer IISB

Thermal engineering of power electronic systems is a key to achieve high performance and reliability. The focus of the tutorial is the thermal design and validation of a power electronic inverter exemplified by a 100 kW SEMIKUBE IGBT converter equipped with additional thermal sensors. The attendees should have basic knowledge on power semiconductor devices and power electronics systems.

After a review of the basic theory of heat transfer, the calculation of losses in a voltage source inverter will be explained. For selected stationary operating conditions, the expected device temperatures of the sample converter will be calculated from datasheet values. Application of online tools to facilitate this process will be demonstrated. Participants can chose between FEM simulations and equivalent thermal network calculation with LTspice™ to simulate these operating conditions. The results are compared to thermal measurements using thermocouples and an IR camera. Furthermore, a 3rd practical training group will deal with modeling of a power board with 3D CFD thermal analysis.