Characterization and Performance of 600V 100A Solid-State Circuit Breaker

Solid State Circuit Breakers (SSCB) are a growing applications of Wide-Band-Gap (WBG) semiconductor devices, because of their ability to perform arc-less interruption of high DC currents. However, a necessary exercise before applying any novel switching device to the breaker space is the evaluation of its switching characteristics at the breaker's rated voltage and current. The turn ON and turn OFF losses have been accepted as two key parameters for performance evaluation. Since SSCB's are normally closed in their nominal operational state and are opened in fault conditions, this makes conduction losses the dominant form of thermal stress. However, characterizing the switching performance of an SSCB is also very useful to validate protection functionality, speed and ability to perform within its safe operating area. Towards that end, Double Pulse Testing (DPT) which is a testing apparatus intended for characterizing single semiconductor devices, has been adopted in this paper as a platform for SSCB testing of switching losses and dynamics, off-state voltage blocking and on-state current interruption. Such a platform provides a basis for comparative analysis of different SSCB implementations without having to expend energy by continuously operating at rated power. The DPT platform was used to validate an SSCB package from ATOMPower Inc, and the data obtained from the test was further post-processed in Python. MATLAB/Simulink software has been used for demonstration purposes and experimental results are included in this paper.