Thermal stress mitigation by Active Thermal Control: Architectures, models and specific hardware

This work proposes an Active Thermal Control (ATC) of power switches. Leveraging on the fact that thermal stress has wide impact on the system reliability, controlling thermal transients is supposed to lengthen the lifetime of electronic conversion systems. Indeed in some environments, such as transportation, reliability and lifetime are still obstacles to widespread adoption of electric and electronic actuators, despite a general trend of electrification spreading in many different areas of interest. Active thermal control is attained leaving the electric parameters of load untouched, while acting dynamically on gate parameters (voltage and resistance), by means of a specifically designed gate driver. Two different control algorithms, sharing similar model and hardware, are presented: one is based on a linear controller, while the other relies on a model-predictive control (MPC) strategy. Simulation results of control schemes are presented, together with evaluation of the proposed loss models. Experimental proof of the ability of the proposed control to reduce thermal swing and related stress on the device is presented, too.