Advantages of SiC MOSFETs in High Frequency Bidirectional PFC Converters for Industrial Applications

The request of Active Front End (AFE) converters with bidirectional functionalityis growing at high rate. This is due to the fast development of smart charging infrastructures related to Car Electrification process and V2G applications inside the Smart Grid. Such power converters are required to provide high performance with high efficiency and overall low complexity. A viable approach to this purpose is the introduction of SiC power devices. In this paper, the use of SiC power MOSFETs in high frequency PFC converters is analyzed in typical three-phase applications, in order to show the benefit of such solutions. In particular, a 2-level three-phase full bridge (B6) and a 3-level NPC2 (3L-TType) converters are considered and a comparison with silicon power semiconductors is carried under different switching frequency in the both bidirectional operating modes.