Soft sensor design for estimation of thermal behavior of encapsulating materials in power electronic module

Abstract

With the emergence of new semi-conductor technologies, an increasing number of high integrated power electronic modules are designed. The increase of reliability of power modules induces the precise knowledge of the local temperature, even if it cannot be measured at any location. In this paper, the design of a soft sensor, more precisely a linear functional observer, is proposed. It enables the estimation of the temperature at any location using measurements provided from thermal sensors located at a number of precise points. The aim is to design a reduced size observer that could be implemented on a real-time embedded target such as Digital Signal Processor. Consequently, it is necessary to obtain a minimal order observer to limit the computation complexity.