Circular Economy in Power Electronics – Power Semiconductors

Inhalt:
Today's power semiconductors are known for their reliability and a service life of more than 20 years. While the power semiconductors in trains and various network applications are also used for this period and are sometimes even replaced with a new generation of power semiconductors at the end of their service life, there are other applications where the required service life is significantly less than these figures. In such applications, power semiconductors with a longer service life are still available at the end of the inverter's service life. A typical example of this is electric vehicles. After 400,000 kilometers and, for example, 8 years, which corresponds to the end of the life of the electric vehicle (and the battery in use in the electric vehicle), highly reliable and very powerful semiconductor modules are still available. Es-pecially in electromobility, in which high-performance SiC power semiconductors are often used, as they correspond to a 7-8% greater range with the same battery, it therefore makes sense to reuse the power semiconductors. As the batteries are often already intended for a second life as a storage solution in households or energy systems, it is also worth making the corresponding effort to remove the affected battery and power semiconductor components. In this publication, we will discuss a specific case with such a second life use of power semiconductors and also present some tests that allow a minimal check of the power semiconductors for a second life use.