heart failure is common in patients with chronic renal disease, either as a complication of renal failure or from shared risk factors, or is the major cause of death in patients on dialysis. at present, end stage renal disease (esrd) patients who have systolic heart failure are considered high-risk for surgery; and nephrologists and cardiologists are reluctant to refer these patients for kidney...

Increasing complexity of design in automotive electrical systems has been paralleled by increased demands for analysis of the safety and reliability aspects of those designs. Such demands can place a great burden on the engineers charged with carrying out the analysis. This paper describes how the intended functions of a circuit design can be combined with a qualitative model of the electrical ...

Power semiconductor devices under short-circuit are submitted to high current and high voltage simultaneously that induce high electrical and thermal stresses. Several types of event leading to failure can appear under short circuit conditions in IGBT depending on the device structure, current load and voltage levels. One particular short circuit event appears once the device has turned off. Af...

Reliability is one of the key issues for the application of Silicon carbide (SiC) diode in high power conversion systems. For instance, in high voltage direct current (HVDC) converters, the devices can be submitted to high voltage transients which yield to avalanche. This paper presents the experimental evaluation of SiC diodes submitted to avalanche, and shows that the energy dissipation in th...