Design of health monitoring models for power devices

This project highlights in a succinct manner various methods of failure for IGBT and a proposed method via Simplorer to find the Rth of a physical circuit system. Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors (IGBT) is amongst the most commonly used power electronic devices. They are widely used in the application of motor drivers, switching supplies, and other power conversion systems. Although they are fairly reliable, failures of IGBT still occur, leading to costly maintenance, inconvenient repairs, costly redundancy designs and at worst, catastrophic failures. By understanding the failure mechanisms in these IGBT and using real-time monitoring of their electrical and thermal characteristics, it may be possible to create health monitoring systems to predict impending failures of these devices. This can help the system controller to take evasive measures. In this project, the author has studied in detail, common failure mechanisms and so has come up with probable design health monitoring methods/models for IGBT.Bachelor of Engineerin