Voltage Balance Switching Scheme for Series-Connected SiC MOSFET LLC Resonant Converter

Abstract

To achieve high efficiency and power density, silicon carbide (SiC)-based Inductor-Inductor-Capacitor (LLC) resonant converters are applied to the DC/DC converter stage of a solid-state transformer (SST). However, because the input voltage of an SST is higher than the rated voltage of a commercial SiC device, it is essential to connect SiC devices in series. This structure is advantageous in terms of voltage rating, but a parasitic capacitance tolerance between series-connected SiC devices causes voltage imbalance. Such imbalance greatly reduces system stability as it causes overvoltage breakdown of SiC device. Therefore, this paper proposes a switching scheme to solve the voltage imbalance between SiC metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs). The proposed scheme sequentially turns off series-connected SiC MOSFETs to compensate for the turn-off delays caused by parasitic capacitor tolerances. In addition, dead-time selection methods to achieve voltage balance and zero voltage switching simultaneously are provided in detail. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, experiments were conducted on a 2 kW series-connected SiC MOSFET LLC resonant converter prototype.