Time to Get a Larger Hammer

After two days of running perfectly, I found yesterday morning that the amps were down and the FET had blown again. This really stumped me because I thought I had done everything to keep it cool and out of the switching region.

After showing the system to the power supply EEs at work, they told me that any FET in a TO-220 case like the one I had would not handle a constant 8-amps for a long time. The heat dissipation comes from the bond wires going to the silicon inside, not the actual silicon itself. They suggested that I put multiple FETs in parallel to lower the resistance and spread the heat over multiple sets of FET bond wires. If you can lower the resistance by half, the power dissipation goes down by a factor of four.

As you might imagine, I'm getting really tired of blown FETs, so I rummaged through our lab stock and got the biggest FET I could find.


Here's a comparison of the FET's I'm using. Instead of one TO-220 case FET on the left, I'm installing THREE of the TO-247 case FETs on the right in parallel with heatsinks. I'll be taking the "on" resistance from 30 milliohms down to 3 milliohms. By dropping the resistance by a factor of 10, I can theoretically lower the power dissipation by 100 (I^2*R from ohms law).


Here are the three high-power FETs installed inside the charge detector box. Note the burnt spot in the lower right corner of the printed circuit board from the smaller, individual FET that burned up yesterday morning.

I just started charging with this new circuit about an hour ago. The charge detector box is COLD. I can barely feel a slight temperature difference between the top of the box and the vehicle chassis.

Some might think this is overkill. Those folks would be right. It probably is, but I'm sick of wasting my own time and the time of all the folks at work who are graciously helping me out. I would rather nuke this one with an overdesigned system instead of having to revisit it several times.


Here's a third schematic (click to enlarge) including the changes to Q1, Q2 and Q3 FETs on the right side.

I sure hope this issue is dead. I've got a few EV shows coming up and I'm done with dealing with this issue. Let's see what happens. Hail Mary.