Condition monitoring for failure monitoring of power electronic assemblies

Ensuring safe and reliable functionality of electronical componets, especially power electronic assemblies, over the life of the vehicle, will be an ever greater challenge for highly automated driving (applications) in the future. This makes condition monitoring and failure forecasts for power electronics in electric vehicles all the more important. The circuit approach presented in this study of an independent electronic development, as part of the power electronic module level, and the results of the realized measurements already achieved in previous studies are dedicated to the ambitious goal of ensuring the functional reliability of power electronic systems in the field of electro-mobility by continuously determining the state over the entire sevice life. This is realized by the symbiosis of two fundamentally different concepts of condition monitoring (conditon indicator, parameter determination). The first concept presented here continuously measures Vce of a power electronic mudule during operation and thus enables status monitoring. Previous studies (1) have shown that by evaluating the change in Vce of the IGBT, statements can be made about the state of degradation and thus about the remaining service life. This allows for a continuous condition monitoring of the power electronics in the application. The second concept, which is presented here, is based on the measurement of the collector emitter forward voltage (Vce_on).