An adjustable sensorless shoot-through protection for H-bridges Academic Article in Scopus uri icon

abstract

  • © 2018 IEEE.The converters relying on H-bridge configurations exhibit complementary ¿symmetrical¿ switching devices for which a triggering dead-time must be considered in order to prevent shoot-through faults. There are two ways in which such dead-time is usually added to the bridges' input signals; namely, from the switching program itself, and by using dedicated embedded modules inside micro-controllers. There are also protections that sense the semiconductors' current to identify and avoid its increase above some threshold. However, those techniques rely on programming skills, operating robustness-against noise, supply variations, IC's malfunctioning, etc.-or in surging currents which are anyhow undesired. In this work, an adjustable and sensorless shoot-through protection is presented as a physical circuit to mend the triggering signals if needed, so the desired dead-times are enforced. The circuit has been prototyped and tested against faulty and non-faulty signals to evaluate its proper operation.

publication date

  • December 26, 2018