Model-based Active Thermal Management for Neutral-point Clamped Power Converter with Adaptive Weight
2022-01-0873
03/29/2022
- Content
- The Permanent Magnet Synchronous Machines (PMSM) are commonly used for Electric Vehicles (EV) to benefit from their higher torque and efficiency, better performance and heat dissipation capability compared to an asynchronous machine. The reliability of the power converters for PMSM drive is crucial for EVs operation and is mainly related to semiconductors' junction temperature. Semiconductors face the heating and cooling process, which causes shear stress between these layers. This stress caused failures on the devices and increases maintenance costs. This paper focuses on providing an active thermal management for a motor drive system using the Finite Control Set Model Predictive Control (FCS-MPC) approach. Active thermal management is a method to reduces the thermal cycling on the device, which improves the reliability of the system. The proposed method uses the FCS-MPC method to predict the three-level Neutral-Point Clamped (3L-NPC) converter's electro-thermal characteristic to find its optimum state. The speed reference is converted to the reference current via a Field-Oriented Control (FOC), and a Cauer-thermal network is used to predict the junction temperature of the semiconductors. The mission objectives vary during the EV operation; thus, adaptive weighting is applied to the objective function to control thermal cycling effectively. The preliminary results of the proposed method show that thermal cycling can be managed to improve reliability, and FCS-MPC is a powerful tool to provide a multi-objective control for EV powertrains.
- Citation
- Ozkan, G., Hoang, P., Badr, P., Timilsina, L. et al., "Model-based Active Thermal Management for Neutral-point Clamped Power Converter with Adaptive Weight," SAE Technical Paper 2022-01-0873, 2022, .