Development of a Didactic Platform for Flexible Power Electronic Converters

Abstract

Power electronic converters are the subject of several studies and applications. Knowledge about those converters is essential for several technical and undergraduate courses in the field of Electrical Engineering and related areas.The presence of converter modules in laboratories can be beneficial for experimental validations in academic research and educational purposes, for allowing students to have practical contact with different converter topologies and applications. However, the commercially available power converters are generally manufactured for specific applications, with poor versatility and high cost, when applied for academic purposes. For this reason, several laboratories propose the design of versatile converters, mainly for multilevel converter research. Nevertheless, most of these projects present module designs based on half-bridge topology due to their low cost. Therefore, this project topology requires more modules to operate as topologies based on a full-bridge converter. Besides, modules based on full-bridge topology can also work in a half-bridge configuration. Thus, this work presents the design of full-bridge modules capable of operating as different types of converters, as well as the project of the dc-link voltage measurement, isolated power supply and bypass circuits. Moreover, this work addresses the heatsink choice, the thermal evaluation for the semiconductor devices and the realization of galvanic isolation between the signal and power circuits.