Study of a novel electronics circuit for detecting faults in the IGBT

In this paper the analysis of an electronic circuit for detecting faults in the IGBT based on measuring the gate signal is presented. The proposed circuit uses discrete analog and digital devices for future implementation on the side of the IGBT gate driver without introducing optocouplers or DACs. The purpose of this work is to design a simple and robust electronic circuit to detect failures early. Only the failures by short-circuit and open-circuit device are considered in this work. To achieve an early detection the IGBT gate signal behavior during turn-on transient is used and to achieve the robustness an adaptive threshold is added. Finally all stages of the general scheme for detection and identification of faults are simplified to obtain a compact electronic circuit and the results are validated with PSpice software using real components exclusively.