Toward virtual prototyping of power electronics: Model order reduction for tight-coupled electro-thermal simulation

Abstract

This work describes a nonlinear projection-based model order reduction (MOR) method specialized for tightly-coupled transient electro-thermal (ET) simulation of power electronic modules, one attempt to enable multi-domain virtual prototyping for power electronics design. The MOR scheme is applied directly on the field-based ET system of equations. The main feature lies in the separation of weak and strong nonlinearities present in the problem, with the former being directly reduced and the latter treated as external inputs. This treatment ensures the efficiency of projection-based MOR by maintaining a small number of inputs and enables Newton's type of solution of the reduced nonlinear system leading to faster convergence.