Silicon-based ceramics and ceramic matrix composites (CMCs), such as silicon carbide (SiC) fiber reinforced SiC, are promising candidates for hot section components in next generation turbine engines. Environmental barrier coatings (EBCs) are essential for implementing these components as they insulate and protect the substrate from reaction with water vapor in the engine environment. EBCs are typically deposited via atmospheric plasma spraying (APS) and preparing the component surfaces through cleaning and roughening prior to coating is a vital step to ensure sufficient coating adhesion. The adhesion of a plasma sprayed coating to the underlying component is one of the most important properties as the component will not be protected if the coating is not well adhered. Surface roughening of metallic components via grit blasting is well documented and understood, but much less is known about preparing ceramic and ceramic composite surfaces for thermal spray coating. Silicon coatings are often used as a bond coating between SiC-based components and EBC top layers, but the adhesion strength of plasma sprayed Si on these substrates, Si splat formation and the factors that affect coating formation and adhesion have not been well studied. The effects of automated grit blasting process parameters on surface roughness and material loss of a reaction bonded SiC (rb SiC) composite were evaluated. Surface roughness before and after grit blasting was evaluated with a confocal laser scanning microscope. The differences and advantages of automated grit blasting compared to manual grit blasting were observed. Most notably was the level of control at high nozzle traverse speeds resulting in reduction of material loss and consistency of roughening. At high nozzle traverse speeds, the amount of material loss decreased greatly with a small effect on induced surface roughness. The degree of grit blasting induced roughness and material loss was found to be largely dependent on the nature of the composite matrix and reinforcement, as well as blast nozzle traverse speed. A statistical model was developed to predict the substrate thickness loss and induced average roughness based on nozzle traverse speed and blast pressure for automated grit blasting. Additionally, laser ablation was used to create controlled, regularly patterned surface texture on rb SiC substrates to further investigate the role of texture parameters in Si coating adhesion. Si was plasma sprayed onto rb SiC substrates to deposit both thick coatings to evaluate adhesion strength and single splats to study splat formation. Surface roughness/texture, substrate preheat temperature and mean Si particle size were varied in plasma spray coating experiments to observe their role in coating adhesion strength. Si adhesion strength was found to be related to all three factors and a statistical model was developed to predict adhesion strength based on them. Substrate preheat temperature had a significant effect on both Si adhesion strength and Si splat formation on rb SiC. Single splat formation during plasma spraying of Si on SiC was simulated with software called SimDrop. Simulations of Si droplet impact, spreading and solidification during plasma spraying on smooth and textured SiC surfaces were used to investigate the effects of relevant process parameters on splat formation. Experimentally observed Si splats on smooth substrates at different temperatures during deposition were matched with simulated splats with the same spraying parameters. A change in thermal contact resistance with changing substrate preheat temperature was confirmed by the simulation results. The role of surface texture parameters for a regularly patterned surface texture in splat formation was demonstrated through simulation. This dissertation investigates methods of roughening and preparing a SiC composite substrate for plasma spray coating, as well as factors which affect the adhesion strength and splat formation of plasma sprayed Si through experiments and simulation. The observations made provide valuable insight for understanding and optimizing the manufacturing processes utilized to deposit strongly adhered coatings onto SiC-based composites. In addition, areas of interest in this field for future study and further investigation are introduced and suggested. / Doctor of Philosophy / Silicon-based ceramics and ceramic matrix composites (CMCs), such as silicon carbide (SiC) fiber reinforced SiC, are promising candidates for hot section components in next generation turbine engines. Environmental barrier coatings (EBCs) are essential for implementing these components as they insulate and protect the substrate from reaction with water vapor in the engine environment. EBCs are typically deposited via atmospheric plasma spraying (APS) and preparing the component surfaces through cleaning and roughening prior to coating is a vital step to ensure sufficient coating adhesion. The adhesion of a plasma sprayed coating to the underlying component is one of the most important properties as the component will not be protected if the coating is not well adhered. Silicon coatings are often used as a bond coating between SiC-based components and EBC top layers, but the adhesion strength of plasma sprayed Si on these substrates, Si splat formation and the factors that affect coating formation and adhesion have not been well studied. This dissertation investigates methods of roughening and preparing a SiC composite substrate for plasma spray coating, as well as factors which affect the adhesion strength and splat formation of plasma sprayed Si through experiments and simulation. The observations made provide valuable insight for understanding and optimizing the manufacturing processes utilized to deposit strongly adhered coatings onto SiC-based composites. In addition, areas of interest in this field for future study and further investigation are introduced and suggested.

As power conversion technology is being integrated further into high-reliability environments such as aerospace and electric vehicle applications, a full analysis and understanding of the system's robustness under operating conditions inside and outside the safe-operating-area is necessary. The robustness of power semiconductor devices, a primary component of power converters, has been traditionally evaluated through qualification tests that were developed for legacy silicon (Si) technologies. However, new devices have been commercialized using wide bandgap (WBG) semiconductors including silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN). These new devices promise enhanced capabilities (e.g., higher switching speed, smaller die size, lower junction capacitances, and higher thermal conductance) over legacy Si devices, thus making the traditional qualification experiments ineffective. This work begins by introducing a new methodology for evaluating the switching robustness of SiC metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs). Recent static acceleration tests have revealed that SiC MOSFETs can safely operate for thousands of hours at a blocking voltage higher than the rated voltage and near the avalanche boundary. This work evaluates the robustness of SiC MOSFETs under continuous, hard-switched, turn-off stresses with a dc-bias higher than the device rated voltage. Under these conditions, SiC MOSFETs show degradation in merely tens of hours at 25si{textdegree}C and tens of minutes at 100si{textdegree}C. Two independent degradation and failure mechanisms are unveiled, one present in the gate-oxide and the other in the bulk-semiconductor regions, detected by the increase in gate leakage current and drain leakage current, respectively. The second degradation mechanism has not been previously reported in the literature; it is found to be related to the electron hopping along the defects in semiconductors generated in the switching tests. The comparison with the static acceleration tests reveals that both degradation mechanisms correlate to the high-bias switching transients rather than the high-bias blocking states. The GaN high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT) is a newer WBG device that is being increasingly adopted at an unprecedented rate. Different from SiC MOSFETs, GaN HEMTs have no avalanche capability and withstand the surge energy through capacitive charging, which often causes significant voltage overshoot up to their catastrophic limit. As a result, the dynamic breakdown voltage (BV) and transient overvoltage margin of GaN devices must be studied to fully evaluate the switching ruggedness of devices. This work characterizes the transient overvoltage capability and failure mechanisms of GaN HEMTs under hard-switched turn-off conditions at increasing temperatures, by using a clamped inductive switching circuit with a variable parasitic inductance. This test method allows flexible control over both the magnitude and the dV/dt of the transient overvoltage. The overvoltage robustness of two commercial enhancement-mode (E-mode) p-gate HEMTs was extensively studied: a hybrid drain gate injection transistor (HD-GIT) with an Ohmic-type gate and a Schottky p-Gate HEMT (SP-HEMT). The overvoltage failure of the two devices was found to be determined by the overvoltage magnitude rather than the dV/dt. The HD-GIT and the SP-HEMT were found to fail at a voltage overshoot magnitude that is higher than the breakdown voltage in the static current-voltage measurement. These single event failure tests were repeated at increasing temperatures (100si{textdegree}C and 150si{textdegree}C), and the failures of both devices were consistent with room temperature results. The two types of devices show different failure behaviors, and the underlying mechanisms (electron trapping) have been revealed by physics-based device simulations. Once this single-event overvoltage failure was established, the device's robustness under repetitive overvoltage and surge-energy events remained unclear; therefore, the switching robustness was evaluated for both the HD-GIT and SP-HEMT in a clamped, inductive switching circuit with a 400 V dc bias. A parasitic inductance was used to generate the overvoltage stress events with different overvoltage magnitude up to 95% of the device's destructive limit, different switching periods from 10 ms to 0.33 ms, different temperatures up to 150si{textdegree}C, and different negative gate biases. The electrical parameters of these devices were measured before and after 1 million stress cycles under varying conditions. The HD-GITs showed no failure or permanent degradation after 1-million overvoltage events at different switching periods, or elevated temperatures. The SP-HEMTs showed more pronounced parametric shifts after the 1 million cycles in the threshold voltage, on-resistance, and saturation drain current. Different shifts were also observed from stresses under different overvoltage magnitudes and are attributable to the trapping of the holes produced in impact ionization. All shifts were found to be recoverable after a relaxation period. Overall, the results from these switching-oriented robustness tests have shown that SiC MOSFETs show a tremendous lifetime under static dc-bias experiments, but when excited by hard-switching turn-off events, the failure mechanisms are accelerated. These results suggest the insufficient robustness of SiC MOSFETs under high bias, hard switching conditions, and the significance of using switching-based tests to evaluate the device robustness. These inspired the GaN-based hard-switching turn-off robustness experiments, which further demonstrated the dynamic breakdown voltage phenomena. Ultimately these results suggest that the breakdown voltage and overvoltage margin of GaN HEMTs in practical power switching can be significantly underestimated using the static breakdown voltage. Both sets of experiments provide further evidence for the need for switching-oriented robustness experiments to be implemented by both device vendors and users, to fully qualify and evaluate new power semiconductor transistors. / Doctor of Philosophy / Power conversion technology is being integrated into industrial and commercial applications with the increased use of laptops, server centers, electric vehicles, and solar and wind energy generation. Each of these converters requires the power semiconductor devices to convert energy reliably and safely. textcolor{black}{Silicon has been the primary material for these devices; however,} new devices have been commercialized from both silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) materials. Although these devices are required to undergo qualification testing, the standards were developed for silicon technology. The performance of these new devices offers many additional benefits such as physically smaller dimensions, greater power conversion efficiency, and higher thermal operating capabilities. To facilitate the increased integration of these devices into industrial applications, greater robustness and reliability analyses are required to supplement the traditional tests. The work presented here provides two new experimental methodologies to test the robustness of both SiC and GaN power transistors. These methodologies are oriented around hard-switching environments where both high voltage biases and high conduction current exist and stress the intrinsic semiconductor properties. Experimental evaluations were conducted of both material technologies where the electrical properties were monitored over time to identify any degradation effects. Additional analyses were conducted to determine the physics-oriented failure mechanisms. This work provides insight into the limitations of these semiconductor devices for both device designers and manufacturers as well as power electronic system designers.

Three-phase rectifiers/inverters are widely used in grid-tied applications. Take the electric vehicle (EV) charging systems as an example. Within a certain space designated for the chargers, quick charging yet high efficiency are demanded. According to the current industry practice, with a power rating between 10 and 30 kW, the power density are limited by silicon (Si) power semiconductor devices, which make the systems operate at only up to around 30 kHz. The emerging wide bandgap (WBG) power semiconductor devices are considered as game changing devices to exceed the limits brought by their Si counterparts. Much higher switching frequency, higher power density and higher system efficiency are expected to be achieved with WBG power semiconductor devices. Among different types of WBG power semiconductor devices, Silicon Carbide Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistors (SiC MOSFETs) are more popular in current research conducted for tens of kW power converter applications. However, the commonly adopted hard switching operation in this application still leads to significant switching loss at high frequency operation even for SiC-based systems. With the unique feature that the turn-off energy is almost negligible compared with the turn-on energy, critical conduction mode (CRM) based zero voltage soft switching turn-on operation is preferred for the SiC MOSFETs to eliminate the turn-on loss with small penalty on the conduction loss and on the turn-off loss. With this soft switching operation, switching frequency of SiC-based systems is able to be pushed to more than ten times higher than Si-based systems, and therefore higher power density yet even higher system efficiency can be achieved. The CRM-based soft switching is applied to three-phase rectifiers/inverters under the unity power factor operating condition first. Decoupled CRM-based control is enabled, and the inherent drawback of wide switching frequency variation range at CRM-based operation is overcome by the proposed novel modulation technique. It is the first time that CRM-based soft switching modulation is demonstrated in the most conventional three-phase H-bridge ac–dc converter, and more than three-time size reduction compared with current industry practice yet 99.0% peak efficiency are achieved at above 300 kHz switching frequency operation. Then this proposed soft switching modulation technique is extended to non-unity power factor operating conditions especially for grid-tied inverter system applications. With several improvements on the modulation, a generalized CRM-based soft switching modulation technique is proposed, which is applicable to both the unity and non-unity power factor conditions. With the power factor down to 0.8 lagging or leading according to commercial products, above 98.0% peak efficiency is achieved with the generalized soft switching modulation technique at above 300 kHz switching frequency operation. Furthermore from the aspect of electromagnetic interference (EMI), compared with the traditional Si-based design, CRM operation brings higher differential-mode (DM) EMI noise, and higher dv/dt with SiC MOSFETs brings higher common-mode (CM) EMI noise. What's more, hundreds of kHz switching frequency operation makes the main components of the system EMI spectrum located within the frequency range related to the EMI standard (150 kHz – 30 MHz). Therefore, several methods are adopted for the reduction of EMI noise. The total inductor current ripple is reduced with multi-channel interleaving control in order to reduce DM EMI noise. The balance technique is applied in order to reduce CM EMI noise. With PCB winding coupled inductors, the well-controlled parasitic parameters make the balance technique able to be effective for a uniform reduction of CM EMI noise from 150 kHz to above 20 MHz. In addition, PCB winding based magnetic designs are beneficial to achieving manufacture automation and reducing the labor cost. / Doctor of Philosophy / Power electronics and power conversion are crucial to many applications related to electricity, such as consumer electronics, domestic and commercial appliances, automobiles, data centers, utilities and infrastructure. In today's market, quality and reliability are usually considered as a given; high efficiency (low loss), high power density (small size and weight) and low cost are the main focuses in the design of power electronics products. In the past several decades, significant achievements in power electronics have been witnessed thanks to the silicon (Si) semiconductor technology, especially the Si power semiconductor devices. Nowadays, the development of Si power semiconductor devices is already close to the theoretical limits of the material itself. Therefore, in order to meet the increasing demands from customers in different applications, wide bandgap (WBG) based power semiconductor devices, namely Gallium Nitride (GaN) and Silicon Carbide (SiC), are becoming attractive because of its great potential compared with their Si counterparts. In literature, great contributions have already been made to understanding the WBG based power semiconductor devices. It is exciting and encouraging that some of the GaN-based power electronics products featuring high efficiency, high power density and low cost have been commercialized in consumer electronics applications. However, when pursuing these objectives, previous literature has not shown any applications of high frequency soft switching technology into the high power ac–dc conversion (usually three-phase ac–dc) in a simple way as the low power ac–dc conversion (usually single-phase ac–dc) in consumer electronics products. The key to achieving high efficiency, high power density and low cost is the high frequency soft switching operation. For single-phase ac–dc systems, the research on the realization of soft switching by control strategies instead of additional physical complexity has been intensively conducted, and this technology has also been adopted in the current industry practice. Therefore, the major achievement of this work is the development of a generalized soft switching control strategy for three-phase ac–dc systems, without adding any physical complexity, which is applicable to the simplest and most conventional three-phase ac-dc circuit topology. The proposed soft switching control strategy features bidirectional (rectifiers/inverters) power conversion, active/reactive power transfer, grid-tied/stand-alone modes, and scalability to multi-channel interleaved operation. Furthermore, with high frequency, the integration of magnetic components with embedded windings in the printed circuit board (PCB) becomes feasible, which is also beneficial to achieving electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and manufacture automation. Based on the proposed control strategy and design methodology, a SiC-based 25-kW three-phase high frequency soft switching rectifier/inverter is developed for various applications such as electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, uninterruptible power supplies (UPS) and renewable energy based utilities.

With the increasing demand for clean and renewable energy, new distribution network concepts, such as DC microgrids and distributed power generation networks, are being developed. One key component of such networks is the grid-interfacing DC-DC power converter that can transfer power bi-directionally while having a wide range of voltage step-up and step-down capabilities. Also, with the proliferated demand for electric vehicle chargers, battery energy storage systems, and solid-state transformers (SST), the bi-directional high-power DC-DC converter plays a more significant role in the renewable energy industry. To satisfy the requirements of the high-power bi-directional wide-range DC-DC converter, different topologies have been compared in this thesis, and the four-switch buck-boost (FSBB) converter topology has been selected as the candidate. This work investigates the operation principle of the FSBB converter, and a digital real-time low-loss quadrangle current mode(QCM) control implementation, which satisfies the zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) requirements, is proposed. With the QCM control method, the FSBB converter efficiency can be further increased by reducing the inductor RMS current and device switching loss compared to traditional continuous current mode(CCM) control and discontinuous current mode(DCM) control. Although the small signal model has been derived for FSBB under CCM control, the small ripple approximation that was previously used in the CCM model no longer applies in the QCM model and causing the model to be different. To aid the control system compensator design, QCM small signal model is desired. In this thesis, a small signal model for FSBB under QCM control is proposed. A 50 kW silicon carbide (SiC) based grid-interfacing converter prototype was constructed to verify the QCM control implementation and small signal model of the FSBB converter. For driving the 1.2kV SiC modules, an enhanced gate driver with fiber optic (FO) based digital communication capability was designed. Digital on-state and off-state drain-source voltage sensors and Rogowski coil-based current sensors are embedded in the gate driver to minimize the requirement for external sensors, thus increasing the power density of the converter unit. Also, Rogowski-coil-based current protection and drain-source voltage-based current protection is embedded in the gate driver to prevent SiC switching device from damage. / Master of Science / The renewable energy sector is driving the development of new distribution networks, such as DC microgrids and distributed power generation networks. One crucial component of these networks is the grid-interfacing DC-DC power converter, which can transfer power in both directions while maintaining a wide voltage range. This study evaluates various topologies and selects the four-switch buck-boost (FSBB) converter topology to meet the demands of high-power, bi-directional, and wide-range DC-DC converters. This work analyzed the operation of the FSBB converter and proposed a novel simplified quadrangle current mode (QCM) control implementation. With the QCM control method, the FSBB converter efficiency can be further improved by reducing losses compared to conventional control methods. This study also provides a small signal model, which can be used to aid the control loop compensator design where application of FSBB converter is required. A 50 kW silicon carbide (SiC) based grid-interfacing converter prototype, which was constructed to validate the proposed QCM control implementation and small signal model of the FSBB converter. As part of the converter unit,the enhanced gate driver design and implementation is presented in this thesis. This gate driver is designed with fiber optic-based digital communication, drives the wide bandgap SiC modules. The gate driver also features embedded digital on-state and off-state drain-source voltage sensors and non-intrusive current sensors to minimize external sensor requirements, thereby increasing the power density of the converter unit. The gate driver also incorporates high bandwidth current protection and drain-source voltage-based current protection to protect the SiC switching device from damage.

Natural resources are always collected from harsh environments, such as mines and deep wells. Currently, depleted oil wells force the gas and oil industry to drill deeper. As the industry drills deeper, temperatures of these wells can exceed 210 °C. Contemporary downhole systems have reached their depth and temperature limitations in deep basins and are no longer meet the high requirements in harsh environment industries. Therefore, robust electronic systems that can operate reliably in harsh environments are in high demand. This thesis presents a high temperature reference voltage generator that can operate reliably up to 250 °C for a downhole communication system. The proposed reference voltage generator is designed and prototyped using 4H-SiC bipolar transistors. Silicon carbide (SiC) is a semiconductor material that exhibits wide bandgap, high dielectric breakdown field strength, and high thermal conductivity. Due to these properties, it is suitable for high-frequency, high-power, and high-temperature applications. For bypassing the lack of high temperature p-type SiC transistors (pnp BJT, PMOS) and OpAmp inconvenience, an all npn voltage reference architecture has been developed based on Widlar bandgap reference concept. The proposed reference voltage generator demonstrates for the first time a functional high temperature discrete reference voltage generator that uses only five 4H-SiC transistors to achieve both temperature and supply independent. Measurement results show that the proposed voltage reference generator provides an almost constant negative reference voltage around -3.23 V from 25 °C to 250 °C regardless of any change in power supply with a low temperature coefficient (TC) of 42 ppm/°C. / Master of Science

Modern data center power architecture developing trend is analyzed, efficiency improvement method is also discussed. Literature survey of high frequency isolated power conversion system which is also called solid state transformer is given including application, topology, device and magnetic transformer. Then developing trend of this research area is clearly shown following by research target. State of art wide band gap device including silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) devices are characterized and compared, final selection is made based on comparison result. Mostly used high frequency high power DC/DC converter topology dual active bridge (DAB) is introduced and compared with novel CLLC resonant converter in terms of switching loss and conduction loss point of view. CLLC holds ZVS capability over all load range and smaller turn off current value. This is beneficial for high frequency operation and taken as our candidate. Device loss breakdown of CLLC converter is also given in the end. Medium voltage high frequency transformer is the key element in terms of insulation safety, power density and efficiency. Firstly, two mostly used transformer structures are compared. Then transformer insulation requirement is referred for 4160 V application according to IEEE standard. Solid insulation material are also compared and selected. Material thickness and insulation distance are also determined. Insulation capability is preliminary verified in FEA electric field simulation. Thirdly two transformer magnetic loss model are introduced including core loss model and litz wire winding loss model. Transformer turn number is determined based on core loss and winding loss trade-off. Different core loss density and working frequency impact is carefully analyzed. Different materials show their best performance among different frequency range. Transformer prototype is developed following designed parameter. We test the developed 15 kW 500 kHz transformer under 4160 V dry type transformer IEEE Std. C57.12.01 standard, including basic lightning test, applied voltage test, partial discharge test. 500 kHz 15 kW CLLC converter gate drive is our design challenge in terms of symmetry propagation delay, cross talk phenomenon elimination and shoot through protection. Gate drive IC is carefully selected to achieve symmetrical propagation delay and high common mode dv/dt immunity. Zero turn off resistor is achieved with minimized gate loop inductance to prevent cross talk phenomenon. Desaturation protection is also employed to provide shoot through protection. Finally 15 kW 500 kHz CLLC resonant converter is developed based on 4160V 500 kHz transformer and tested up to full power level with 98% peak efficiency. / Master of Science

With GaN and SiC switching devices becoming more commercially available, higher switching frequency is being applied to achieve higher efficiency and power density in power converters. However, electro-magnetic interference (EMI) becomes a more severe problem as a result. In this thesis, the switching frequency effect on conducted EMI noise is assessed. As EMI noise increases, the EMI filter plays a more important role in a power converter. As a result, an effective EMI modeling technique of the power converter system is required in order to find an optimized size and effective EMI filter. The frequency-domain model is verified to be an efficient and easy model to explore the EMI noise generation and propagation in the system. Of the various models, the unterminated behavioral model can simultaneously predict CM input and output noise of an inverter, and the prediction falls in line with the measurement around 10 MHz or higher. The DM terminated behavioral model can predict the DM input or output noise of the motor drive higher than 20 MHz. These two models are easy to extract and have high prediction capabilities; this is verified on a 10 kHz-switching-frequency Si motor drive. It is worthwhile to explore the prediction capability of the two models when they are applied to a SiC-based power inverter with switching frequency ranges from 20 kHz to 70 kHz. In this thesis, the CM unterminated behavioral model is first applied to the SiC power inverter, and results show that the model prediction capability is limited by the noise floor of the oscilloscope measurement. The proposed segmented-frequency-range measurement is developed and verified to be a good solution to the noise floor. With the improved impedance fixtures, the prediction from CM model matches the measurement to 30 MHz. To predict the DM input and output noise of the SiC inverter, the DM terminated behavioral model can be used under the condition that the CM and DM noise are decoupled. With the system noise analysis, the DM output side is verified to be independent of the CM noise and input side. The DM terminated behavioral model is extracted at the inverter output and predicts the DM output noise up to 30 MHz after solving the noise floor and DM choke saturation problem. At the DM input side, the CM and DM are seen to be coupled with each other. It is found experimentally that the mixture of the CM and DM noise results from the asymmetric impedance of the system. The mixed mode terminated behavioral model is proposed to predict the DM noise when a mixed CM effect exists. The model can capture the DM noise up to to 30 MHz when the impedance between the inverter to CM ground is not balanced. The issue often happens in extraction of the model impedance and is solved by the curving-fitting optimization described in the thesis. This thesis ends with a summary of contributions, limitations, and some future research directions. / Master of Science

Nanostructured ferritic alloy and silicon carbide composite materials (NFA-SiC) were sintered with spark plasma sintering (SPS) method and systematically investigated through X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), as well as density and Vickers hardness tests. Pure NFA, pure SiC, and their composites NFA-SiC with different compositions (2.5 vol% NFA-97.5 vol% SiC, 5 vol% NFA-95 vol% SiC, 97.5 vol% NFA-2.5 vol% SiC, and 95 vol% NFA-5 vol% SiC) were successfully sintered through SPS. In the high-NFA samples, pure NFA and NFA-SiC, minor gamma-Fe phase formation from the main alfa-Fe matrix occurred in pure NFA 950 degree C and 1000 degree C. The densities of the pure NFA and NFA-SiC composites increased with sintering temperature but decreased with SiC content. The Vickers hardness of the pure NFA and NFA-SiC composites was related to density and phase composition. In the high-SiC samples, NFA addition of 2.5 vol% can achieve full densification for the NFA-SiC samples at relative low temperatures. With the increase in sintering temperature, the Vickers hardness of the pure SiC and NFA-SiC composite samples were enhanced. However, the NFA-SiC composites had relative lower hardness than the pure SiC samples. A carbon layer was introduced in the NFA particles to prevent the reaction between NFA and SiC. Results indicated that the carbon layer was effective up to 1050 degree C sintering temperature. Green samples of gradient-structured NFA-SiC composites were successfully fabricated through slip casting of an NFA-SiC co-suspension. / Master of Science

This thesis provides insight into state-of-the-art 1.2 kV silicon carbide (SiC) power semiconductor transistors, including the MOSFET, BJT, SJT, and normally-on and normally-off JFETs. Both commercial and sample devices from the semiconductor industry's well-known manufacturers were evaluated in this study. These manufacturers include: Cree Inc., ROHM Semiconductor, General Electric, Fairchild Semiconductor, GeneSiC Semiconductor, Infineon Technologies, and SemiSouth Laboratories. To carry out this work, static characterization of each device was performed from 25 ºC to 200 ºC. Dynamic characterization was also conducted through double-pulse tests. Accordingly, this thesis describes the experimental setup used and the different measurements conducted, which comprise: threshold voltage, transconductance, current gain, specific on-resistance, parasitic capacitances, internal gate resistance, and the turn on and turn off switching times and energies. For the latter, the driving method used for each device is described in detail. Furthermore, for the devices that require on-state dc currents, driving losses are taken into consideration. While all of the SiC transistors characterized in this thesis demonstrated low specific on-resistances, the SiC BJT showed the lowest, with Fairchild's FSICBH057A120 SiC BJT having 3.6 mΩ•cm2 (using die area) at 25 ºC. However, the on-resistance of GE's SiC MOSFET proved to have the smallest temperature dependency, increasing by only 59 % from 25 ºC to 200 ºC. From the dynamic characterization, it was shown that Cree's C2M0080120D second generation SiC MOSFET achieved dv/dt rates of 57 V/ns. The SiC MOSFETs also featured low turn off switching energy losses, which were typically less than 70 µJ at 600 V bus voltage and 20 A load current. / Master of Science

Silicon carbide and silicon nitride turbine engine components are susceptible to hot corrosion by molten sodium sulfate salts which are formed from impurities in the engine's fuel and air intake. Several oxide materials were identified which may be able to protect these components from corrosion and preserve their structural properties. Ta20, coatings were identified as one of the most promising candidates. Thermochemical calculations showed that the chemical vapor deposition(CVD) of tantalum oxide from O2 and TaCI5 precursors is thermodynamically feasible over a range of pressures, temperatures, and reactant concentrations. The deposition of Ta205, as a single phase is predicted in regions of excess oxygen, where the reaction is predicted to yield nearly 100% efficiency. CVD experiments were carried out to deposit tantalum oxide films onto SiC substrates. Depending on the deposition conditions, a variety of coating morphologies have been produced, and conditions have been identified which produce dense, continuous Ta205 deposits. Preliminary corrosion tests on these coatings showed no apparent degradation of the CVD deposited tantalum oxide coatings. The feasibility of depositing ZrTi04 as a coating material was also investigated based on thermochemical considerations. Since no data were available for this material, thermodynamic values were estimated. Thermochemical calculations indicated the chemical vapor deposition of zirconium titanate from O2, ZrCl4, and TiCl4 occurs over a range of temperatures in a very narrow region of the phase diagram. Deviations from the single phase region predicted the codeposition of either Zr02 or Ti02 with ZrTi04. These results suggested that the chemical vapor deposition of ZrTi04 may be difficult from a process handling perspective. Additionally, the process is predicted to be very inefficient, leaving substantial amounts of unreacted chlorides in the reactor exhaust. / Master of Science