Estimation of Semiconductor Switching Losses under Hard Switching using Matlab/Simulink Subsystem

The conventional tools for the system level simulation of the switch-mode power converters (for example, MATLAB/SIMILINK) allow simulating the behavior of a power converter jointly operating with the control system in a closed automatic regulation system. This simulation tools either represent semiconductor devices as ideal switches or implement the simplest models based on volt-ampere characteristics of standard types of semiconductor devices for conducting loss estimation. This fact makes direct calculation of dynamic power losses in the semiconductor devices impossible. The MATLAB/SIMILINK subsystem that calculates the average power dissipated in the power switch during turn-on and turn-off transition is proposed in this paper. The represented approach used in the subsystem estimates by the means of MATLAB/SIMILINK the values of turn-on and turn-off energies at power switch commutation instances on the base of switching current and voltage measurements and the values of commutation energies given in datasheet on power switch. The simulation results of step-down converter with IGBT and proposed subsystem in MATLAB/SIMULINK were compared with the calculation results obtained in Semisel