Electro-Thermal Modeling of a Boost Converter Considering Device Self-heating

Abstract

Thermal management is one of the most critical aspects of the design of high power density converters. Recently, significant efforts and progress have been made in developing electro-thermal models for power semiconductor devices as they are very sensitive to temperature changes. Passive components such as inductors and capacitors are also investigated, since they are temperature-dependent. However, most published work focuses on electro-thermal model of a single power device or a module only instead of a whole converter, which is more realistic in terms of converter design. Hence, in this work, a datasheet informed electro-thermal model is proposed for a boost converter. It is achieved by adding additional behavior models to the existing electrical model of each power device to reflect the temperature incurred electrical behavioral change. Loss model and RC network are used to estimate the temperature change. This forms a power loss and temperature feedback loop. The advantages of this work are ease of integration with existing electrical models in the SPICE library, and elimination of the complicated physical properties of the power devices, but fully utilizes the device datasheet information and mathematical method.