Reducing expenditure with cooling in renewable power conversion systems with innovative SiC switches

Lately, strong focus has been given to cost reduction of renewable power conversion systems in order to enhance their competitiveness. The expenditure with cooling represents a significant factor not only on the construction costs (enclosure) but also on additional energy consumption during the equipment lifetime. SiC switches have several outstanding properties that may enable significant savings, firstly by means of reducing the overall losses given its outstanding static and dynamic properties. In addition to this, SiC-based devices can withstand much higher temperature levels enabling smaller heatsinks, with 400°C being widely demonstrated in several publications and up to 600°C theoretically expected [1-3]. It is nevertheless possible to identify several limiting issues in the path of such high temperature levels either, not only at device but also on circuit periphery level, as will be discussed in this publication.