Design considerations of a 15kV SiC IGBT enabled high-frequency isolated DC-DC converter

The advent of the 15kV SiC IGBT device has made a single series stage medium-voltage (MV) and high-frequency (HF) DC-DC Dual Active Bridge (DAB) converter application viable. The Y: Y/Δ three-phase DAB is a high-power isolated DC-DC converter based on three-level neutral-point clamped (NPC) on the MV side. A MV/HF transformer used in the DAB, has significant parasitic capacitances, which cause ringing in the DAB current under high dV/dT switching. In addition, the converters need sufficient dead-time between complimentary switches to avoid possibility of any shoot-through. The length of the dead-time depends on switching characteristics. Both the dead-time and transformer parasitics affect zero voltage switching (ZVS) performance of the DAB. Thus, the DAB design has to be closely coupled with the switching characteristics of the devices and MV/HF transformer parasitics. For the ZVS mode, the current-vector needs to be between converter voltage vectors with a certain margins defined by dead-time, parasitics and desired duty ratio of three-level MV converter. This paper addresses these design challenges for the MV DAB application.