Summer Report

Adaptive Digital Drive of IGBTs for High Power Applications

Supervisor:

Submitted By: RAVI KUMAR SONI Roll no.- 08404ENO11 IDD (Part-V, Sem. -IX )

Dr. S.K. SINGH Department of Electrical Engineering

Literature Survey

The IGBT is attractive because of the high input impedance at the gate and the control that can be exercised over the switching by the gate drive. In its most basic form, the gate drive applies a step voltage to the gate input capacitance via a gate resistor. The gate resistor should be chosen to limit the dv/dt to an acceptable range, particularly at turn on, without introducing unacceptable delays. High current IGBTs have a specified gate resistor value, which is optimized for low switching losses and acceptable device stresses ( dv/dt, di/dt, current overshoot, and voltage overshoot). Another feature of modern IGBTs is the permissible use of their active region to the extremes of the safe operating area, typically for 10 s. As the characteristics of insulated gate bipolar transistors have been constantly improving. Its utilization in power converters operating at higher voltage and higher frequencies has become more common. A central issue in reducing the size and cost of IGBT power converters is to control or limit dv/dt and di/dt during the switching process. Load side snubbers and clamp circuits are bulky and expensive. Increasing the gate resistors values is cheap and simple but switching times as well as power losses are increased.

ACTIVE GATE CONTROL AVC refers to the direct control of the IGBT collector emitter voltage within a feedback loop. It is a classic feedback control method which reduces the dependence of the performance on the main plant (in this case the IGBT). The collector emitter voltage is the feedback term to the control loop, and follows the reference. Thus the IGBT voltage is controlled. The method has been successfully applied to a wide range of IGBT devices.

The hardware of the gate driver has three main parts: the control stage, the measurement stage, and the output stage. The measurement stage measures the collectoremitter voltage and the gate voltage. These measurements are compared with some reference values to determine if the measured value is higher or lower than a reference voltage. The control stage uses this digital information to determine in which time interval the switching process is and applies a preprogrammed constant gate current reference to each time interval. The output stage is composed by current sources that convert the digital output signal of the control stage (gate current reference) in a real gate current. During the blocking state, the gate driver maintains the voltage of the gate terminal at 15 V, while during the ON state the gate terminal is set to 15 V. The closed-loop control is employed to adaptively adjust the gate drive voltage to control the switching speed according to a preset control reference. As a result, both the voltage overshoot and current overshoot can be effectively controlled. This new gate drive method enables programmable control of switching speed and allows full use of the capability of the power devices. The oscillations during IGBT switching are also reduced and associated EMI problems can be mitigated.

SERIES CONNECTION OF IGBTs Series connection of IGBT or any other power devices is attractive. If the operating voltage can be increased for a given power rating, the operating current can be decreased. This leads to the advantage of that the power connections can be made smaller and the effects of stray inductance can be reduced greatly. Also transformers are no longer needed when operating at high voltages. Therefore, the equipments can be made smaller and lighter. Devices with lower voltage ratings usually have higher operating frequencies. Therefore, with IGBTs series connected, the operating frequency can be increased, which will also improve the performance of the equipments. When the operating frequency has been increased, at the same rating, the series connection of IGBTs can have lower power losses than one single IGBT. Therefore, series connection of IGBTs are of great advantage and desirable in industry. However, due to individual parameter differences of the series-connected IGBTs, it is difficult to ensure a proper voltage balance between them, and transient or steady-state voltage unbalances could cause the failure of these devices.

REASONS OF VOLTAGE UNBALANCING Among all the factors that can cause voltage unbalancing during IGBT series connection, the most important factor is the device characteristic difference. As we know, the manufacture process of IGBT is very complex, including etching, oxide growth, deposition, diffusion and many other procedures. Many of these procedures cant be very precise and therefore, even the IGBTs have the same design and are manufactured at the same time, there will be some small differences among them. The gate-to-emitter capacitor, gate-to-collector capacitor, output capacitor and many other components have small differences and these factors would cause voltage unbalancing in switching transients and static voltage balancing which could cause the failure of these devices. For example, as shown in Fig , the two IGBTs have different I-V curves although they are the same model. When IGBT1 and IGBT2 are series connected, the current flowing through them will be the same but the voltage on each device is quite different which means the static voltage sharing is very bad. From the figure it can be seen that IGBT2 will go beyond its SOA faster than IGBT1.

Other factors, such as the time-delay of control signal , stray inductances and capacitances in the system and snubber circuit will also have some effects on the voltage sharing of IGBT series connection.

VOLTAGE BALANCING Voltage balancing can be achieved by using AVC technique. The voltage imbalance during switching is prevented from destroying the device by actively clamping the voltage across the device. If the voltage of the device with the highest voltage is controlled to be clamped to a reference voltage which is less than the voltage rating of IGBT, the overvoltage naturally distributes across the other devices in the series connection. This ensures a safe operation of power devices without reducing the speed of the IGBTs since the device voltage is limited when it exceeds the voltage reference. It also acts only on those devices which have overvoltages. Thus the efficiency will be comparable to ideal balanced case efficiency. In addition, the control does not act when the voltages are balanced, which is also important because devices that are already balanced should not be slowed down. Therefore a local closed loop feedback control is used for voltage balancing. IN this the IGBT voltage is sensed by using a potential divider across the collector-emitter junction and this voltage is compared with the reference voltage. If the IGBT voltage is greater than the reference, the overvoltage is converted to the positive gate current with appropriate feedback gain. This positive current is applied to the gate its long as there is an overvoltage across the IGBT. The IGBT collector-emitter voltage is decreased by virtue of the additional positive charge on the gate. However, the feedback control is so fast that the device is not fully turned on or off and it operates in the active region. During the control transients if any overvoltage is applied to the IGBT again by the external circuit, the feedback is active to control the IGBT voltage to the reference and the voltage distributes among the other devices.

REFERENCES: [1] Zhongyuan Chen, Jialiang Wen,Jian Han, Quanqing Wei, Rui Wu, Na Jia ,Deshang Sha, An Analysis of IGBT Connected In Series Under Active Voltage Control,Second International Conference on Intelligent System Design and Engineering Application 2012, pp. 1188 1191. [2] C. Gerster and P. Hofer, Gate-controlled dv/dt and di/dt limitation in high power IGBT converters, EPE Journal, Vol. 5, no 3/4, January 1996, page 11-16. [3] N.Y.A. Shammas, R. Withanage and D. Chamund. Review of series and parallel connection of IGBTs. IEE Proc.-Circuits Devices Syst., Vol. 153, No. 1, February 2006. [4] Sasagawa, K, Abe, Y, and Matsuse, K. Voltage balancing method for IGBTs connected in series. Conf. Record of the Industry Applications Conf., Vol. 4, pp. 25972602,1318 Oct. 2002. [5] R. P. Palmer and H. S. Rajamani, Active voltage control of IGBTs for high power applications, IEEE Trans. Power Electron., vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 894901, Jul. 2004. [6] P. R. Palmer, Y. Wang, M. S. Abu-Khaizaran, and S. Finney, Design of the active voltage controller for series IGBTs, in Proc. 35th Annu. IEEE PESC, Aachen, Germany, pp. 3248 3254, Jun. 2004. [7] Ju Won Baek, Dong-Wook Yoo, Heung-Geun Kim. High voltage switch using seriesconnected IGBTs with simple auxiliary circuit.IEEE Trans.Ind. Appl, 2001, 37, (6), pp. 18321839. [8] P.R. Palmer and A. N. Githiari, The Series Connection of IGBTs with Optimized Voltage Sharing in the Switching Transient, Proceedings of IEEE PESC 1995, VOI 1, pp.44-49. PDF to Word