Condition Monitoring for Device Reliability in Power Electronic Converters: A Review

Abstract

Condition monitoring (CM) has already been proven to be a cost effective means of enhancing reliability and improving customer service in power equipment, such as transformers and rotating electrical machinery. CM for power semiconductor devices in power electronic converters is at a more embryonic stage; however, as progress is made in understanding semiconductor device failure modes, appropriate sensor technologies, and signal processing techniques, this situation will rapidly improve. This technical review is carried out with the aim of describing the current state of the art in CM research for power electronics. Reliability models for power electronics, including dominant failure mechanisms of devices are described first. This is followed by a description of recently proposed CM techniques. The benefits and limitations of these techniques are then discussed. It is intended that this review will provide the basis for future developments in power electronics CM.

Review of Power Semiconductor Device Reliability for Power Converters

“…Among them, the aluminum bond fatigue [10], [20] and solder fatigue [21] are the two main failure mechanism of IGBT modules. The aluminum bond wire fatigue including bond wire lift off and heel cracking is caused by the temperature fluctuation and unmatched CTE at the lead-to-chip connection point [12], [22].…”

Simultaneous On-State Voltage and Bond-Wire Resistance Monitoring of Silicon Carbide MOSFETs

“…Repeated thermal cycling then leads to thermo-mechanical stress that results in the gradual wear-out of the packaging materials. The most pertinent issues are lift-off and cracking of the bond-wires that connect the semiconductor die to the terminals of the power module, and fatigue in the solder joints which reduces the effective area for heat to escape via conduction from the die through the baseplate [6].…”

A novel five-level optimized carrier multilevel PWM quad-inverter six-phase AC drive

“…Many issues are still not clearly overcome with multilevel inverters vulnerability to potential failures. Mostly suffers with power parts and survey reveals 31-37 % of faults is occurred by power parts with IGBT devices and also due to capacitors and gate control methods [1,[6][7][8]. On the other hand, the technology development in multiphase ac drives make them candidates to replace standard three-phase drives in configurations with limited rating (MOSFET/IGBT) devices [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19].…”