Experimental verification of calculated IGBT losses in PFCs

Measurements of insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) losses in modulated converters present a difficult challenge because of the wide variations in the waveform. As an alternative, earlier references (1994, 1995) provided a means of calculating these losses from out-of-circuit test data, but no experimental verification was presented. To provide this verification, this present study compares these calculated losses with measured losses obtained from the temperature rise of the heat sink of the IGBT. These experimental results agree quite well with the earlier loss calculations, and the largest deviation for four test cases is less than 4%.