In this paper, we describe a newly developed electro-thermal-mechanical coupled simulation for HV inverters; power devices and their driver circuit models; a modeling technique for fast and accurate calculation; and simulation results and their verification. The simulation is based on an electric circuit simulation technique and is obtained by modeling a motor, motor controller, power semiconductor devices and their driver circuits, interconnections, smoothing capacitors, and thermal circuits of power semiconductors, including the package structure. For the IGBT device model, we defined the power device model parameters that affect power loss and surge voltage, adjusted them to the most suitable values, and added new model parameters. This made it possible to obtain simulation results for one-pulse loss in which the error was only 10%, including temperature dependence. We employed a combination of a function model and a SPICE model for the IGBT driver circuits to reduce the calculation time and improve the accuracy. We also simplified other models to reduce the calculation time by determining the characteristics that most influence acceleration performance. Using this modeling technique, a simulation of 5 seconds' full-throttle operation was carried out in 16 hours of computation time. The error in the simulation was within 5%. We can estimate the inverter performance with different component characteristics, because the simulation contains models for all major components.
展开▼
