An Auxiliary Power Supply for Gate Drive of Medium Voltage SiC Devices in High Voltage Applications

Abstract

A high-reliability auxiliary power supply (APS) for gate drive circuits is crucial to utilization of emerging medium voltage (MV ≥ 10 kV) Silicon Carbide (SiC) devices in high voltage applications. This paper proposes an active voltage divider based APS with lower arm voltage regulation. The proposed APS circuit is targeting the application of MV SiC devices in modular multilevel converters (MMCs). It can harvest energy from a MV (≥ 7 kV) dc bus to provide an isolated low voltage output to gate drive circuits of MV SiC devices. Compared to existing APS solutions, it can achieve a high input voltage (≥ 7 kV) with simple circuit structure and control scheme. In this paper, the working principle of the proposed APS is presented and a circuit design example is shown. A circuit prototype with 7 kV input and 15 V/10 W output has been built and tested to verify the effectiveness of the proposed solution.