An Improved Voltage Clamp Circuit Suitable for Accurate Measurement of the Conduction Loss of Power Electronic Devices

Sensors

Qiuping Yu¹  Yumeng Cai¹  Peng Sun¹  Bin Zhao¹  Zhibin Zhao¹ 

[1] State Key Laboratory of Alternate Electrical Power System with Renewable Energy Sources, North China Electric Power University, Beijing 102206, China;

关键词: power electronic devices;    drain–source voltage clamp circuit;    power loss;    conduction loss;    on-state voltage;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s21134285

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Power electronic devices are essential components of high-capacity industrial converters. Accurate assessment of their power loss, including switching loss and conduction loss, is essential to improving electrothermal stability. To accurately calculate the conduction loss, a drain–source voltage clamp circuit is required to measure the on-state voltage. In this paper, the conventional drain–source voltage clamp circuit based on a transistor is comprehensively investigated by theoretical analysis, simulations, and experiments. It is demonstrated that the anti-parallel diodes and the gate-shunt capacitance of the conventional drain–source voltage clamp circuit have adverse impacts on the accuracy and security of the conduction loss measurement. Based on the above analysis, an improved drain–source voltage clamp circuit, derived from the conventional drain–source voltage clamp circuit, is proposed to solve the above problems. The operational advantages, physical structure, and design guidelines of the improved circuit are fully presented. In addition, to evaluate the influence of component parameters on circuit performance, this article comprehensively extracts three electrical quantities as judgment indicators. Based on the working mechanism of the improved circuit and the indicators mentioned above, general mathematical analysis and derivation are carried out to give guidelines for component selection. Finally, extensive experiments and detailed analyses are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed drain–source voltage clamp circuit. Compared with the conventional drain–source voltage clamp circuit, the improved drain–source voltage clamp circuit has higher measurement accuracy and working security when measuring conduction loss, and the proposed component selection method is verified to be reasonable and effective for better utilizing the clamp circuit.

【 授权许可】

Unknown