A High-Resolution In Situ Condition Monitoring Circuit for SiC Gate Turn-Off Thyristor in Grid Applications

Silicon carbide (SiC) gate turn-off (GTO) thyristor is attractive for grid applications due to the excellent performances of high blocking voltage and low ON-resistance. However, the short-circuit reliability issue has become one of the limiting factors. An in situ condition monitoring method for th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE journal of emerging and selected topics in power electronics 2021-08, Vol.9 (4), p.4115-4125
Main Authors: Liu, Yinyu, Liu, Lifang, Yin, Shan, Gu, Yunfei, Deng, Shuairong, Xing, Zhanqiang, Zhou, Quanfeng, Li, Zhiqiang, Zhou, Kun
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
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<italic xmlns:ali="http://www.niso.org/schemas/ali/1.0/" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">I–V characteristics
analog circuit
Circuit reliability
Circuits
Condition monitoring
Degradation
Electric potential
Gate turn off
gate turn-off (GTO) thyristor
Logic gates
Monitoring
MOSFET
P-n junctions
Reliability
Reliability aspects
short circuit
Short circuits
Silicon carbide
silicon carbide (SiC)
Temperature measurement
Thyristors
Voltage
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Summary:Silicon carbide (SiC) gate turn-off (GTO) thyristor is attractive for grid applications due to the excellent performances of high blocking voltage and low ON-resistance. However, the short-circuit reliability issue has become one of the limiting factors. An in situ condition monitoring method for the reliability of SiC GTO is presented in this work. It uses the forward I - V characteristics of anode-gate p-n junction as the reliability degradation precursor of SiC GTO. The monitoring circuit shows a current resolution of 64~ \mu \text{A} with the current range of −31~1027 mA. It provides full electrical isolation with 2-kV isolation voltage. Finally, a set of short-circuit power cycling tests are conducted with the monitoring circuit, and the results show that the method proposed in this article can effectively detect the change of I - V characteristics of SiC GTO to predict the degradation of device physical health.
ISSN:2168-6777
2168-6785
DOI:10.1109/JESTPE.2021.3061580