Young Engineer Award

The Winner in 2022 is: 

Chengmin Li, Jing Sheng, Drazen Dujic, EPFL, Switzerland
Title: Short Circuit Protection of SiC MOSFET Module with Extended Short Circuit Withstanding Time

Short biography
Chengmin Li received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China, in 2013, and the Ph.D. degree from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 2019. From March 2016 to March 2017, he was a Research Intern with GE Global Research Center, Shanghai, China. Since 2020, he has been a Postdoctoral Researcher with Power Electronics Laboratory,École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne,Lausanne, Switzerland. His research interests include medium-voltage high-power converters and applications of SiC power MOSFETs.

Summary of the paper
We propose a two-step protection method to achieve fast and noise-immune protection during the short-circuit (SC) of SiC Module. Firstly, the high current at the loop stray inductor introduced by short-circuit is detected and the gate driving voltage is clamped to a lower value to increase the short-circuit withstanding time; secondly, the phase leg output voltage is sensed and compared with a pre-set reference value to further verify the short-circuit event. If it is confirmed, an error signal is generated to turn off the power devices. Experimental results confirm excellent performances of the proposed protection scheme.