Switching Characterization and Short-Circuit Protection of 1200 V SiC MOSFET T-Type Module in PV Inverter Application

In this paper, a 1200 V, 100 A T-type full SiC power module is evaluated in a five-level T-type photovoltaic (PV) inverter. The T-type module is characterized with double pulse test, and based on the results, loss evaluation of the PV inverter is performed. The high power density of 27 W/in3 and 3 kW/kg, and the peak efficiency of 99.2% are achieved for the lab prototype. A de-sat based short-circuit protection scheme using commercial driver chip ACPL339J is presented and experimentally verified on the PV inverter prototype. With the presented circuit, less than 600 ns response time is realized, and a two-stage soft turn-off circuit with gate voltage clamping is implemented. A gate voltage stabilizer circuit without affecting the switching loss is also proposed to prevent false trigger. Experimental results show the superior performance of the T-type module-based PV inverter and demonstrate the effectiveness of the protection scheme.