Abstract
The The development of advanced Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) has enabled high-frequency switching operation and has improved the performance of PWM inverters for motor drive. However, the high rate of dv/dt of IGBT has adverse effects on motor insulation stress. In many motor drive applications, the inverter and motor are separated and it requires long motor feds. The long cable contributes high frequency ringing at the motor terminal and it results in high surge voltage which stresses the motor insulation. The inverter output filter and RDC snubber are conventional method which can reduce the surge voltage.
In this paper, we propose the new low loss snubber to reduce the motor terminal surge voltage. The snubber consists of the series connection of charging/discharging capacitor and the voltage-clamped capacitor. At IGBT turn-off, the snubber starts to operate when the IGBT voltage reaches the voltage-clamped level. Since dv/dt is decreased by snubber operating, the peak level of the surge voltage can be reduced. Also the snubber operates at the IGBT voltage above the voltage-clamped level, the snubber loss is largely reduced comparing with RDC snubber. The proposed snubber enables to reduce the motor terminal surge voltage with low loss.
