Investigating Iron Loss Properties in an Amorphous Ring Excited by Inverters based on Silicon and Gallium Nitride

Abstract

In this study, we evaluate the iron losses in amorphous magnetic materials (AMM) and non-oriented (NO) rings excited by different inverters that use conventional and next-generation semiconductors. We examined the iron loss characteristics of the AMM ring as a function of carrier frequency when the ring was excited using two inverters. One inverter was a silicon-based insulated gate bipolar transistor (Si-IGBT) and the other was a gallium nitride-based field effect transistor (GaN-FET). We also compared the NO ring under these two inverter excitations. Due to the skin effect, the iron losses of the NO ring decreased with an increase in the carrier frequency under Si-IGBT inverter excitation. The AMM ring remained almost unaffected by the skin effect in the 1-20kHz range; therefore, it is thought that the iron losses based on the AMM ring test fed by the Si-IGBT-inverter had an almost constant value. Under GaN-FET inverter excitation, the iron losses at high carrier frequencies increased because the number of times of ringing derived from the high-speed switching increased. We have shown that the influence of ringing in the AMM ring becomes large in comparison to that in the NO ring because the losses in the AMM ring are less than those in the NO ring in the high-frequency region.