Monitoring IGBT’s Health Condition via Junction Temperature Variations

Authors

Bo Tian, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Wei Qiao, University of Nebraska–LincolnFollow
Ze Wang, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Tanya Gachovska, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow
Jerry L. Hudgins, University of Nebraska-LincolnFollow

Date of this Version

2014

Citation

Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition (APEC), 2014 Twenty-Ninth Annual IEEE Year: 2014

Comments

©2014 IEEE

Abstract

Insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) failures are a major issue in modern power electronics applications. Two most dominated failure mechanisms of IGBTs are solder fatigue and bond wire wear-out. This paper proposes a new method to online monitor an IGBT’s health condition by using the instantaneous junction temperature variation between present and the first operating cycles of the IGBT with the same operating current. In this work, the instantaneous junction temperature of an IGBT is estimated from a thermal network model. The proposed method is validated by experimental results obtained from accelerated aging tests for IGBTs.