Prof. Antonios Antonopoulos receives the IET Premium Award 2022
We are pleased to announce that Antonios Antonopoulos, Assistant Professor of Power Electronics at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens, received the IET Journals Premium Award 2022 for Best Paper in IET Power Electronics, with the work entitled "Failure analysis and lifetime assessment of IGBT power modules at low temperature stress cycles."
The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) awards each year a prize to the authors of the best paper published within the last two years in each of the IET's journals.
Apart from Prof. Antonopoulos, the paper was co-authored by the Professor of Power Electronics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Prof. Dimosthenis Peftitsis, and Senior Research Scientists at SINTEF Energy Research, Dr. Salvatore D'Arco and Dr. Magnar Hernes.
Short abstract: Lifetime models of high-power Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors modules express the number of cycles to end of life as a function of stress parameters. These models are normally developed based on experimental data from accelerated power-cycling tests performed at predefined temperature stress conditions as, for example, with temperature swings above 60 °C. However, in real power converters applications, the power modules are usually stressed at temperature cycles not exceeding 40 °C. Thus, extrapolating the parameters of lifetime models developed using data from high-temperature stress cycles experiments might result in erroneous lifetime estimations. This paper presents experimental results from power cycling tests on high-power Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors modules subjected to low temperature stress cycles of 30 and 40 °C. Therefore, devices experience still accelerated aging but with stress conditions much closer to the real application. Post-mortem failure analysis has been performed on the modules reaching end-of-life in order to identify the failure mechanism. Finally, the number of cycles to end-of-life obtained experimentally is fit with a state-of-the-art lifetime model to assess its validity at low temperature stress cycles. Challenges and limitations on data fitting to this lifetime model and the impact of various stress parameters on the anticipated failure are also presented.
Full paper (open access) is available at: https://doi.org/10.1049/pel2.12083
More about the IET Journals Premium (Best Paper) Awards at: https://digital-library.theiet.org/journals/premium-awards