SPEC 75kVA Sic Intelligent Power Stage (IPS)

SPEC has successfully completed a two-year project sponsored by the Department of Energy’s Office of Electricity’s (OE), Transformer Resilience and Advanced Components (TRAC) program, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The project is led by Dr. Alex Huang, SPEC center director and ECE professor, with major contributions from Zibo Chen, Chen Chen, Houshang Salimian, and Rahul Choudhary. The project resulted in the delivery of two ready-to-operate SiC converters for ORNL. The high-power density 75kVA air-cooled SiC intelligent power stage (IPS) serves as a standardized plug-and-play universal building block for various grid-connected renewable energy applications. Hence the developed IPS can provide an opportunity to simplify renewable energy integration and increase the grid’s resilience, efficiency, and flexibility. Coordinating with a higher-level system controller, multiple IPS can be optimized to achieve bidirectional AC or DC power flow controls from multiple resources and loads. The resulting integrated energy system or microgrid can substantially reduce the Balance of System (BOS) cost due to the standardization achieved in the IPS design.

Taking advantage of the emerging SiC technology, the SPEC IPS used an in-house developed advanced power module packaging approach to pack six converter phase legs into a compact housing. 98.1% two-stage full load converter efficiency, very high-power density, and lower cost compared with other solutions are the key attributes of the SPEC design. The IPS is configured as a multiport, scalable, adaptable, and flexible bidirectional DC-AC converter hence it can be used in a DC-coupled PV plus storage application. The plug-and-play auxiliary power supply can start the system from both DC and AC sides. Multiple software and hardware protections ensure safe operation by the customer. The embedded on-resistance measurement circuit can extract semiconductor health information in each switching cycle, enabling system lifetime prediction and planned maintenance.

More information about the SPEC IPS can be found in the following SPEC publications.

[1] Z. Chen, C. Chen, H. S. Rizi, and A. Q. Huang, " A High Power Density 75kVA Air-Cooled SiC Intelligent Power Stage (IPS) As A Universal Building Block for Grid Applications," 2023 IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition (APEC), 2023.

[2] Z. Chen, C. Chen and A. Q. Huang, "Driver Integrated Online R_ds-on Monitoring Method for SiC Power Converters," 2022 IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (ECCE), 2022, pp. 01-07.