Impact of active thermal management on power electronics design

Power electronic system design is typically constrained by the thermal limitation so by the overall losses and the peak current. To stay within the maximum current, reached only during transients, the system is typically overrated. Active thermal management is used to control the maximum temperature and the temperature swing to reduce failures that are mostly caused by them. In this paper it is proposed to use the active thermal management to reduce the switching losses or to move them to less stressed devices, during transients, such as a module can reach an higher current, without violating thermal constraints, and the need of overdesign can be reduced. Hence an optimal and cost effective design of power electronics system is achieved. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.