Summary
It is becoming more difficult for the traditional 2L-BTB converter to achieve acceptable performance in the wind power application. With higher power and voltage handling abilities, some multilevel and multi-cell converters are become promising for the next generation wind turbines. However, the tradeoffs among performance and cost, as well as the uncertain trends of price and technology, make the suitable configurations for the next generation wind power converter hard to be finally concluded.
Regarding the power semiconductor devices, press-packing IGCT and IGBT shows significant improvement in respect to the thermal resistance compared to the module packaging devices. Due to the current rating limits on the market, paralleled connection of devices may be needed in order to achieve the required amount of power for next generation wind turbines—this will significantly modify the loss/thermal behaviors of individual devices as well as the overall power density, also the cost is another important issue to be investigated when choosing the proper device solutions for the future wind power converter.