Design and Performance of Compact Air-Cooled SiC MOSFET Inverters for Low-Power Variable Speed Drive Applications

Design and experimental results of scalable and modular air-cooled power inverters using commercial SiC power MOSFETs are reported. Compared to the well-established silicon IGBT power inverter, the new SiC power MOSFET inverter offers 40% more output power and 4% higher efficiency for a 12 kW, 20 kHz air-cooled design.  A detailed design and performance tradeoff will be presented from a system-level perspective in terms of cost/kW for WBG inverter applications for vehicle electrification and power generation applications. The design is based on a simple circuit simulation model developed from measurements made on commercial packaged SiC power MOSFETs.