Reduced active and passive thermal cycling degradation by dynamic active cooling of power modules

This work demonstrates an innovative adaptive cooling approach which greatly reduces thermo-mechanical stress and degradation in power modules during operation, enabling the achievement of improved lifetime/reliability figures. That is achieved by monitoring the actual load conditions (i.e., the power losses in the modules) and ambient temperature value to adapt the cooling conditions continuously based on their instantaneous values: an approach defined as Dynamic Active Cooling. The proposed solution is implemented in the form of a full-state observer, which can be implemented in common DSP/FPGA platforms and which does not require actual sensing of the temperature at reliability critical locations, typically internal to the power module.