A Minimum Viable Mission Profile Emulator for IGBT Modules in Modular Multilevel Converters

Various methods have been presented to emulate the electrical behavior of Modular Multilevel Converters (MMCs). To meet the demands for reliability aspect study of MMCs, this paper proposes a minimum viable setup to emulate the thermal behavior and investigates its feasibility for reliability testing. The proposed mission profile emulator has three distinctive features: 1) capable of emulating and measuring the thermal stresses of power modules; 2) capable of implementing practical switching profiles as a full-scale MMC; and 3) with significantly reduced requirement for dc power supply compared to existing setups used for electrical aspect study. Theoretical discussions and experimental measurements are presented to demonstrate the capability of the mission profile emulator.