Adaptive Gate Delay-Time Control of Si/SiC Hybrid Switch for Efficiency Improvement in Inverters

Abstract

Varying gate delay time of the Si insulated-gate bipolar transistor/SiC MOSFET hybrid switch is the key to achieving high efficiency of Si/SiC-hybrid-switch-based power converters because of time-varying characteristics of its junction temperature and operation current. Based on the swarm intelligent algorithm, a novel adaptive delay-time control method of the Si/SiC hybrid switch in an inverter is proposed to achieve higher efficiency than the traditional fixed delay time. In addition, by evaluating the fitness values, the proposed method can easily achieve this goal without establishing the physics-based analytical model of device loss and additional hardware support. The platform of the Si/SiC-hybrid-switch-based single-phase inverter is established and tested, and the particle swarm optimization algorithm is taken as example. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed technique yields 6.2% reduction in the total loss of the single-phase inverter compared to a fixed delay time.