Life Expectancy of DC Fast Charger
Effect of load profile on thermal degradation of semiconductors
A. Bhadury (TU Delft - Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science)
Aditya Shekhar – Mentor (TU Delft - DC systems, Energy conversion & Storage)
F. Kardan – Mentor (TU Delft - DC systems, Energy conversion & Storage)
P. Bauer – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - DC systems, Energy conversion & Storage)
Milos Cvetkovic – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Intelligent Electrical Power Grids)
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Abstract
There will soon be a huge influx of EV chargers required in the coming years. Therefore it is important to find out the lifetime of EV chargers like the DC Fast Charger for business cases. These chargers are a combination of multiple power converters to help regulate the grid AC voltage to something that can be used to charge the battery. Multiple Industrial surveys have shown that the most vulnerable parts of power converters are the power semiconductors used inside them. Moreover, research shows that most of the failure in these EV chargers is due to thermal cycling which causes thermo-mechanical fatigue. While there are studies that estimate the lifetime of these semiconductors, it is seldom done in the context of EV charging load profiles. These EV charging load profiles are responsible for long-term power cycling contrary to short-term power cycling which is generally done to estimate the lifetime of the semiconductors. This thesis shall thus choose a popular DC Fast Charger power converter, feed in
a load profile and analyse the effects of thermal degradation of the switches and rectifier diodes present in the circuit. This data will then be used to make an estimate of how long the whole power converter will last thus leading to the lifetime of the DC Fast Charger.