Electro-Thermal Modeling and Design of High-Current Pulse Power Supply for Electrically Assisted Manufacturing

Abstract

Electrically assisted manufacturing (EAM) is a promising and rapidly developing metal processing method. The power supply is a key sub-system for EAM, which needs to be designed properly. This paper proposes the model-based design of a low-voltage high-current pulse power supply used for EAM based on converter-level electro-thermal modeling. The thermal stress of key components is obtained by converter-level finite element simulations. A simplified thermal modeling method is proposed to reduce the computation burden of the FEM simulation to obtain the dynamic thermal profile under pulse current operation. The impact of the duration of the current pulse on the maximum temperature and temperature variations of MOSFETs is investigated based on the thermal model. A case study of a 10V/500A pulse power supply is presented to demonstrate the theoretical analyses and verification. The outcomes contribute to the design optimization and virtual prototyping of pulse power supplies for EAM applications.

Keywords

• Electrically assisted manufacturing
• electro-thermal modeling
• finite element analysis
• thermal model
• virtual prototyping