Enhancing Power Density and Efficiency of Variable Speed Drives with 1200 V SiC T-MOSFETs

Inhalt:
Employing SiC T-MOSFETs to variable speed drives leads to a significant reduction in power losses even though dv/dt is limited to 5 kV/mus in order to use standard motors. This loss reduction enables lower system costs by reducing the cooling effort and thus downsizing the heatsink as well as lower operating costs due to higher power conversion efficiency. For a 22 kW inverter the heatsink volume could be reduced by more than 50 % and the calculated energy savings are more than 1000 kWh per year for a typical load profile of a pump. The calculations were verified by an experimental inverter test.