Partial discharges measurements at the constituents' level of aerospace power electronics converters

Abstract

Increasing the voltage in aircraft applications may induce reliability problems associated to the occurrence of partial discharges (PD) in systems. Moreover, the specificities of both the environmental conditions(temperature, pressure, relative humidity ...) and of the harsh electrical conditions (high voltage, high frequency, high dV/dt ...) contribute to the risk of partial discharges. This paper describes the assessment of a new method to detect PD in aerospace Power Electronics (PE) systems. In order to properly understand the behavior of PD in these systems, the method is first applied on the so-called “constituents” i.e on the different types of insulating materials used to build components (PCB, Inductance, Capacitance, Busbars, Power Modules ...) of aerospace PE inverters. This investigation is the first step of a larger study aiming to evaluate the validity of this method to detect PD in a complete aerospace PE system during operation.