A 4 kV/120 A SiC Solid-State DC Circuit Breaker Powered By a Load-Independent IPT System

• Published in: IEEE transactions on industry applications 2022-01, Vol.58 (1), p.1115-1125
• Main Authors: Zhao, Shuyan, Dongye, Zhonghao, Wang, Yao, Zan, Xin, Zhang, Hua, Zheng, Sheng, Lu, Xiaonan, Avestruz, Al-Thaddeus, Lu, Fei
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Circuit breakers; Conduction losses; DC circuit breaker; DC circuit breaker (DCCB); ENGINEERING; inductive power transfer; inductive power transfer (IPT); Load fluctuation; load-independent; Logic gates; Magnetic resonance; MOSFET; multiple loads; Network topology; Power transfer; Prototypes; Receivers; Relays; Solid state; Topology
• ISSN: 0093-9994; 1939-9367
• DOI: 10.1109/TIA.2021.3084130

This article introduces a 4 kV/120 A solid-state dc circuit breaker (DCCB) based on discrete SiC mosfet s. The DCCB is designed in a five-layer tower structure. Each layer consists of a circular main conduction branch and an attached gate driver. There are two primary benefits of the proposed DCCB. First, it reduces conduction loss with multiple devices in parallel. Second, it achieves an ultrafast response speed with SiC mosfet s. Moreover, the gate drivers of the DCCB are powered by a domino inductive power transfer (IPT) system. It achieves the load-independent constant-voltage output characteristics, which means the outputs are immune to load variations. An IPT system prototype is implemented to test the power transfer performance. At 500-kHz frequency, the total output power reaches 15.73 W, which is sufficient to power on five gate drivers, with a peak transfer efficiency of 75.4%. The IPT system is tested to power a 4 kV/120 A DCCB prototype. It validates that the DCCB is effective to turn off 120 A current within 3.5 μ s.