Integrated Simulation/Design/Analysis Infrastructure for SiC-based High-Temperature Power Conversion

In order to realize the full potential of Silicon Carbide and to facilitate its deployment in high-temperature power electronics applications, it is important to establish an integrated modeling, simulation, and analysis (MS&A) infrastructure to address the special considerations and numerous technical challenges that must be overcome and to support design at the device, subsystem, and system levels. The viability of such an infrastructure has been established in the on-going Phase I research. The overall objective of the proposed Phase II research is to further its development. In particular, the proposed Phase II effort entails: (1) the continued development of a distributed multi-level (device/subsystem/system) integrated (electrical/thermal) MS&A infrastructure to support SiC device development and their application to Air Force systems, (2) the investigation of how SiC device performance is affected by thermal and material properties and how defects influence thermal-electrical coupling, (3) the partitioning of the geometric physics-based device models for implementation in a distributed computer network, and (4) the investigation of the applicability of this powerful MS&A infrastructure to other areas of interest such as computational fluid dynamics, plasma physics, and combustion.