Design and Performance of Compact Air-Cooled SiC MOSFET Inverters for Low-Power Variable Speed Drive Applications

摘要

Design and experimental results of a scalable and modular air-cooled power inverter using commercial SiC power MOSFETs are reported. Compared to the well-established silicon IGBT power inverter, the new SiC power MOSFET inverter offers 40% more output power and 4% higher efficiency for a 10kW, 20kHz air-cooled design. A detailed design and performance tradeoff is presented from a system-level perspective in terms of cost/kW for SiC inverter for vehicle electrification and power generation applications. The design is based on a simple circuit simulation model developed from measurements made on commercially available packaged discrete SiC power MOSFETs.