The Development of Inverter for Electric Propulsion System UAM using Wide-Bandgap Components

This paper introduces the development of a 150kW inverter for electric propulsion such as urban air mobility (UAM). Considering the power density, the silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFETs were used. A gate driver was designed for safe driving of the SiC modules and on/off characteristic of SiC was optimized through a double pulse test under various load current conditions. In order to increase the reliability of the developed inverter, an overcurrent protection such as DESAT was designed, and the function of the protection circuit was confirmed through the experimental results. The maximum efficiency satisfied 97% and was verified through experiments.