Real-Time Thermal Evaluation of Power Converters in Microgrids by Device Current Reconstruction

Abstract

Real-time simulation is increasingly employed in the validation of power electronics and systems, showing great potential in terms of flexibility and efficiency. With it, electrical behaviors of power converters can be simulated with high accuracy. However, when evaluating the reliability of converters, the switching behaviors of power semiconductors should be simulated, which normally requires a rather high sampling rate and powerful computational capability of the hardware platforms, and such simulations usually take much time Therefore, an efficient approach is introduced in this article to evaluate the thermal performances of power devices. Compared to the prior-art methods, the required sampling rate is much lower, and the proposed approach is also simpler, as only the three-phase current is sampled. The junction temperatures can be simulated with high accuracy. Preliminary results have also validated the effectiveness of this approach.