General 3D lumped thermal model with various boundary conditions for high power IGBT modules

Abstract

Accurate thermal dynamics modeling of high power Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) modules is important information for the reliability analysis and thermal design of power electronic systems. However, the existing thermal models have their limits to correctly predict these complicated thermal behaviors in the IGBTs. In this paper, a new three-dimensional (3D) lumped thermal model is proposed, which can easily be characterized from Finite Element Methods (FEM) based simulation and acquire the thermal distribution in critical points. Meanwhile the boundary conditions including the cooling system and power losses are modeled in the 3D thermal model, which can be adapted to different real field applications of power electronic converters. The accuracy of the proposed thermal model is verified by experimental results.