With wide-spread application of power electronic systems across many different industries, their reliability is being studied extensively. This paper presents a comprehensive review of reliability assessment and improvement of power electronic systems from three levels: 1) metrics and methodologies of reliability assessment of existing system; 2) reliability improvement of existing system by means of algorithmic solutions without change of the hardware; and 3) reliability-oriented design solutions that are based on fault-tolerant operation of the overall systems. The intent of this review is to provide a clear picture of the landscape of reliability research in power electronics. The limitations of the current research have been identified and the direction for future research is suggested.

Solid evidence of magnetic reconnection is rarely reported within sunspots, the darkest regions with the strongest magnetic fields and lowest temperatures in the solar atmosphere. Using the world's largest solar telescope, the 1.6-meter Goode Solar Telescope, we detect prevalent reconnection through frequently occurring fine-scale jets in the Hα line wings at light bridges, the bright lanes that may divide the dark sunspot core into multiple parts. Many jets have an inverted Y-shape, shown by models to be typical of reconnection in a unipolar field environment. Simultaneous spectral imaging data from the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph show that the reconnection drives bidirectional flows up to 200 km s −1 , and that the weakly ionized plasma is heated by at least an order of magnitude up to ∼80,000 K. Such highly dynamic reconnection jets and efficient heating should be properly accounted for in future modeling efforts of sunspots. Our observations also reveal that the surge-like activity previously reported above light bridges in some chromospheric passbands such as the Hα core has two components: the ever-present short surges likely to be related to the upward leakage of magnetoacoustic waves from the photosphere, and the occasionally occurring long and fast surges that are obviously caused by the intermittent reconnection jets.

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We present observations of an M5.7 white-light flare (WLF) associated with a small filament eruption in NOAA active region 11476 on 2012 May 10. During this flare, a circular flare ribbon appeared in the east and a remote brightening occurred in the northwest of the active region. Multi-wavelength data are employed to analyze the WLF, including white light (WL), ultraviolet, extreme ultraviolet, hard X-ray (HXR) and microwave. A close spatial and temporal relationship between the WL, HXR and microwave emissions is found in this WLF. However, the peak time of the WL emission lagged that of the HXR and microwave emissions by about 1-2 minutes. Such a result tends to support the back-warming mechanism for the WL emission. Interestingly, the enhanced WL emission occurred at the two footpoints of the filament. Through forced and potential field extrapolations, we find that the three-dimensional magnetic field in the flare region has a fan-spine feature and that a flux rope lies under the dome-like field structure. We describe the entire process of flare evolution into several steps, each producing the sequent brightening below the filament, the circular flare ribbons and the WL enhancement respectively. We suggest that reconnection between the magnetic field of the filament and the overlying magnetic field or reconnection within the flux rope leads to the WL enhancement.