A 4kV/120A SiC Solid-State DC Circuit Breaker Powered by a Load-independent IPT System

This paper introduces a 4kV/120A solid-state DC circuit breaker (DCCB) based on discrete SiC MOSFETs. The DCCB is designed in a 5-layer tower structure. Each layer consists of a circular main conduction branch and an attached gate driver. There are two primary benefits in the proposed DCCB. First, it reduces conduction loss with multiple devices in parallel. Second, it achieves an ultrafast response speed with SiC MOSFETs. Moreover, the gate drivers of the DCCB are powered by a domino inductive power transfer (IPT) system. It achieves the load-independent constant-voltage output characteristics, which means the outputs are immune to load variations. An IPT system prototype is implemented to test the power transfer performance. At 500kHz frequency, the total output power reaches 15.73W that is sufficient to power on 5 gate drivers, with a peak transfer efficiency of 75.4%. The IPT system is tested to power a 4kV/120A DCCB prototype. It validates that the DCCB is effective to turn off 120A current within 3.5s.