Condition Monitoring of IGBT Module and Forced Air Cooling System Using Heatsink Temperature

The insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) is one of the weakest components in the converter. Therefore, high reliability is very important in terms of price. However, it is very difficult to monitor IGBT's condition because it is not easy to directly measure the junction temperature in practice. And cooling system also important element of converter, but additional method should be used to monitor cooling system. This paper proposes a method of monitoring the condition of IGBT module and cooling system at once by heatsink temperature that is easy to measure. Advantage of proposed method is very easy to implement without interfering operation of IGBT. Simulation tests were conducted to verify the effectiveness and accuracy of this proposed method. The results show that the proposed method can improve accuracy of the reliability of power converter.