Condition Monitoring and Wide Bandgap Power Electronics - Leading Innovations for the European Energy Sector

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The Horizon CL5 call D3-01-14 asks for a) Condition and Health Monitoring and b) Wide Bandgap and Ultra-Wide Bandgap power electronics for the energy sector with a focus on converters for wind farms and the DC grid. The MoWiLife consortium addresses this call with the most advanced technology. Basis for the four MoWiLife pilots is a 2.3 kV SiC MOSFET, which will be developed by project partner Infineon. It includes a source-gate PiN diode, whose on-state voltage has a strong temperature dependence and can be read out by the gate drive, which will be developed by Rostock University. In addition, self-protection features will be integrated into the SiC chip for robustness and direct water cooling will be realized for higher output power. Two wind energy converter pilots are being realized in MoWiLife by two industrial partners. As one of the technology leaders in wind energy, Vestas – supported by University of Aalborg – will realize a TRL 6 SiC converter with +20% power density and digital-twin Condition and Health Monitoring. The start-up RKL together with Rostock University will develop a TRL 5 wind energy power stack with Condition and Health Monitoring based on online chip temperature and on-state voltage measurement. Solar medium voltage DC collection grids and meshed high voltage transmission grids will play an important role in the future. As third and fourth pilots, a TRL 5 DC-DC converter and a TRL 5 DC circuit breaker including condition monitoring are being developed by the MoWiLife university partners KTH Stockholm and University of Aberdeen. While SiC is today’s Wide Bandgap material for high power applications, ultra-high voltage Ultra-Wide Bandgap semiconductors may allow further efficiency improvements for future HVDC converters. The MoWiLife industrial partner DiamFab together with two IUNET universities will work on diamond as the ultimate semiconductor material. The TRL is still low but the potential for energy saving is high.