Ajay Poonjal Pai
Director of WBG Innovation & Application Engineering
Sanan
Dr. Ajay Poonjal Pai obtained his B. Tech in Electrical & Electronics Engineering from NITK Surathkal, India and M.Sc. in Electrical Power Engineering from RWTH Aachen University, Germany. He then pursued his PhD focusing on Silicon Carbide (SiC) power semiconductors for automotive traction inverter applications at the Friedrich Alexander University (FAU), Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. From 2015 to 2023, he worked at Infineon Technologies AG, Germany as a Principal Engineer responsible for next-generation automotive SiC technologies and power modules. Since May 2023, he is working at Sanan Semiconductors Munich, responsible for Wide Bandgap (WBG) Innovation and Application Engineering topics. His research interests include e-mobility, SiC semiconductors, power modules and power electronics, and has contributed to numerous invited lectures and conferences worldwide.
Presentations
A Soft-switching based Inverter Topology for Automotive Traction Applications
With the increasing adoption of battery electric vehicle (BEV), there is an ever increasing focus on their driving range in order to reach an optimum cost-performance ratio. Traction inverter and motors consume over 30% of the overall electrical losses in a battery electric vehicle (BEV). Therefore, optimizing them is important. Due to their unipolar behavior, SiC Mosfets help in reducing power losses by over 50% typically compared to IGBTs. However, the high switching speeds of SiC can seldom be reaped due to system constraints, e.g., dv/dt slew rate limitation due to the motor winding insulation, leaving a significant potential untapped. This talk presents these system-dependent challenges limiting the full-utilization of SiC. An advanced inverter topology is presented which can help to overcome the classical trade-off between switching speed and dv/dt slew rate. This topology also offers soft switching, which helps to significantly reduce switching losses. As a result, an inverter system efficiency of over 99% is reached.