Nowadays, the typical railway traction chain, that operates under AC catenaries, includes a bulky and heavy transformer. In order to reduce the weight and the size of the input transformer, a medium frequency topology, which involves soft commutation mode for the switches, is proposed. At this effect, for the characterization of high voltage components in soft commutation mode, a specific test bench is built in the PEARL. In this paper, experimental characterisation results are given for 6.5 kV IGBTs in Dual-Thyristor mode. The snubber capacitors provide a significant reduction in turn-off energy and a switching frequency of several kHz is then possible.
展开▼
