Design and Evaluation of Isolated Gate Driver Power Supply for Medium Voltage Converter Applications

Design and evaluation of isolated gate driver power supply for medium voltage converter applications

Abstract:

The commercial gate drivers are available upto 6.5 kV IGBTs. With the advances in the SiC, power devices rated beyond 10 kV are being researched. These devices will have use on medium voltage power converters. Commercial gate drivers rated for such high voltages are not available. These power devices have very high dv/dts (30-100 kV/μs) at switching transitions. Such high dv/dts bring in challenges in the gate driver design. The isolation stage of the gate power supply needs to have very low coupling capacitance to limit the high frequency circulating currents from reaching the gate driver control circuits. Also, the isolation stage has to be designed with insulation several times higher than the peak system voltage level. In this paper, design, development and evaluation of the gate power supply for medium voltage level applications have been investigated. Several isolation transformer designs have been investigated and optimum design, with very low coupling capacitance ≈ 0.5 pF, has been identified and used in the gate driver design. Experimental characterization of the transformer has been done. The performance of the gate driver power supply has been evaluated in several MV power converters, using 10 kV SiC MOSFETs.

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