Plastics in high reliability Power Inverter Applications

It is a common opinion, that plastics are not the material of choice for highly reliable applications. This paper describes the motivations for the use of plastics in commercial vehicle (CV) Power Inverters for traction applications, despite having tough reliability requirements. The use of plastics creates new opportunities to increase power density with lower cost, reducing the efforts to meet the required EMC norms. The advanced mechanical design is necessary to achieve reliable design. The design approach considering those aspects will be explained based on AVL's latest commercial vehicle Power Inverter prototype development.