Comparison of power performance of SiC-IGBT with Si-IGBT switches in three-phase inverter for ground power units in aircraft applications

The converters used to integrate the ground power station of a plane with the utility grid are generally created with silicon insulated-gate bipolar transistor (Si-IGBT) based semiconductor technologies. The Si-IGBT switch-based converters, are inefficient, oversized, and had trouble achieving pure sine wave voltages requirements. The efficiency of the Aircraft Ground Power Units (AGPU) can be increased by replacing existing Si-IGBT transistors with silicon carbide (SiC) IGBTs because of the physical constraints of Si-IGBT switches. The primary goal of this study was to prove that an increase in efficiency could be obtained in the case of using SiC-IGBTs in conventional AGPU systems with the realized experimental studies. In this study, three different experimental systems were discussed for this purpose. The first system was the traditional APGU system. The other two systems were Single Phase Test (SPT) and three-phase inverter systems, respectively. The SPT system and three-phase inverter systems were designed and implemented to compare and make analyses of Si-IGBTs and SiC-IGBTs performance. The efficiency and detailed hard switching behavior comparison were done between the 1200-V SiC-IGBT and 1200-V Si-IGBT-based experimental systems. The APGU system and Si-IGBT modules were examined, the switching characteristic and efficiency of the system were obtained in the first experimental study. The second experimental study was carried out on the SPT system. The Single Pulse test system was created using Si-IGBTs and SiC-IGBTs switches in the second experimental system. The third experiment was included a three-phase inverter-based test system. The system was created with Si-IGBTs and SiC-IGBTs to compare the two different switches based on inverters under RL loads. The turning off and turning on processes of the IGBT switches were examined and results were presented. The Si-IGBT efficiency was achieved 77% experimentally in the SPT experimental system. The efficiency of the third experimental system was increased up to 95% by replacing the old Si transistor with a SiC. The efficiency of the three-phase Si-IGBT-based system was 86% for the six switch cases. The efficiencies of the SiC-IGBT-based system were increased around 92% in the three-phase inverter system experimentally. The findings of the experimental results demonstrated that the SiC-IGBT had a faster switching speed and a smaller loss than the classical Si-IGBT. As a result of the experimental studies, it had been revealed that the efficiency increase could be obtained in the case of using SiC-IGBTs in conventional AGPU systems.