Design Considerations of a GaN-based Three-Level Traction Inverter for Electric Vehicles
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Satpathy, Subhransu; Das, Partha Pratim; Bhattacharya, Subhashish; Veliadis, Victor
- Source
- 2022 IEEE 9th Workshop on Wide Bandgap Power Devices & Applications (WiPDA) Wide Bandgap Power Devices & Applications (WiPDA), 2022 IEEE 9th Workshop on. :192-197 Nov, 2022
- Subject
- Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Engineering Profession
General Topics for Engineers
Performance evaluation
Legged locomotion
Low voltage
Switching frequency
Atmospheric modeling
Layout
Voltage
GaN
Three-level Active Neutral Point Clamped (3L-ANPC)
traction inverter
and electric vehicle
- Language
- ISSN
- 2687-8577
This paper demonstrates a GaN-based three-level inverter design for an electric vehicle (EV) traction application. The basic power block is a three-level active neutral point clamped (3L-ANPC) converter operating at 800V DC bus voltage with the use of two paralleled 650V, 60A GaN E-HEMTs. The paper focuses on switching mode selection for better thermal performance of high-power 3L-ANPC inverters. The paper presents design details and guidelines for power layout structure and gate driver. The key parasitic inductances of the designed power block are extracted using ANSYS Q3D. A PLECS simulation model using the device loss parameters shows approximate power delivering capability of 41kW for the designed forced air-cooled three-phase inverter. Experimental double pulse test results are presented with low voltage overshoot to verify the low inductance power loop design. Experimental results of the three-phase 3L-ANPC inverter operation at 70kHz switching frequency are presented for delivered output power of 5.1kW at 550V DC.