Compact Wireless Energy Pick-Up System Coupled Gate-Drive for Medium-Voltage Power Devices in Modular DC Solid-State Circuit Breakers

This article presents a compact inductive power transfer (IPT) based wireless energy pick-up system (WEPUS) coupled gate-drive for medium-voltage power devices in modular direct current (dc) solid-state circuit breakers (SSCBs). There are two major contributions. First, an LCL-S compensated IPT system with constant voltage outputs is applied as auxiliary power supply to power ten submodules in SSCBs, which is advantageous in terms of load independence. Second, a compact modular WEPUS is integrated as part of a power electronics building block (PEBB) to provide modularity in SSCBs. A WEPUS prototype is implemented for ten loads to test power transfer performance, which achieves a peak dc-to-dc efficiency of 88.2% at 47.1 W and 230 kHz frequency. Then, the WEPUS is installed on a real SSCB prototype with ten parallel PEBBs. A 400 A/1 h dc continuous test and a 2 kA fault interruption test powered by the WEPUS are performed, which validate the proposed WEPUS to support SSCBs in both steady-state and transient interruption working modes. This article is accompanied by a slide as multimedia material demonstrating the contributions of the presented work.