Copyright © 2012 Shengqi Zhou et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Defect is one of the key factors in reducing the reliability of the insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) module, so developing the diagnostic method for defects inside the IGBT module is an important measure to avoid catastrophic failure and improves the reliability of power electronic converters. For this reason, a novel diagnostic method based on the approximate entropy (ApEn) theory is presented in this paper, which can provide statistical diagnosis and allow the operator to replace defective IGBT modules timely. The proposed method is achieved by analyzing the cross ApEn of the gate voltages before and after the occurring of defects. Due to the local damage caused by aging, the intrinsic parasitic parameters of packaging materials or silicon chips inside the IGBT module such as parasitic inductances and capacitances may change over time, which will make remarkable variation in the gate voltage. That is to say the gate voltage is close coupled with the defects. Therefore, the variation is quantified and used as a precursor parameter to evaluate the health status of the IGBT module. Experimental results validate the correctness of the proposed method.