Thermal network parameters identifying during the cooling procedure of IGBT module

This paper proposes a thermal network parameter estimation method to find RC parameters of the Cauer network using cooling curve of IGBT module. The solutions are developed by exploiting the relationship between thermal network parameters and time constants of junction temperature response curves. Experimental tests are performed to validate the accuracy of the developed method. Advantages of the proposed method include no need to know the power loss information of IGBT and no need to heat the IGBT module up to thermal steady-state. Moreover, the proposed method is able to obtain complete RC parameters of the Cauer network. In addition, we show that the identified RC parameters can be used for condition monitoring and junction temperature estimation.