Integrated simulation of electromechanical and thermal dynamics of voltage source converters

This paper proposes a simplified yet accurate enough thermal model of Voltage Source Converters (VSC), aimed at circumventing the high computational cost of existing models, which prevents their use in electromechanical simulations. The proposed model reduces to a simple first-order system for thermal dynamics plus two quadratic equations separately modeling the IGBT and diode power losses. In addition, a methodology is provided to derive the proposed VSC thermal model parameters from manufacturer data. The proposed model is tested for two types of devices, both in steady and transient states. The results show that the reduced-order thermal model produces accurate results at a low computational cost, making it especially suitable for the co-simulation of thermal and electrical dynamic phenomena.