Design for reliability and robustness tool platform for power electronic systems — Study case on motor drive applications

Abstract

Because of the high cost of failure, the reliability performance of power semiconductor devices is becoming a more and more important and stringent factor in many energy conversion applications. Thus, the need for appropriate reliability analysis of the power electronics emerges. Due to its conventional approach, mainly based on failure statistics from the field, the reliability evaluation of the power devices is still a challenging task. In order to address the given problem, a MATLAB based reliability assessment tool has been developed. The Design for Reliability and Robustness (DfR 2) tool allows the user to easily investigate the reliability performance of the power electronic components (or subsystems) under given input mission profiles and operating conditions. The main concept of the tool and its framework are introduced, highlighting the reliability assessment procedure for power semiconductor devices. Finally, a motor drive application is implemented and the reliability performance of the power devices is investigated with the help of the DfR 2 tool, and the resulting reliability metrics are presented.

Power Electronics Reliability: State of the Art and Outlook

“…A mission-profile-based reliability prediction tool is developed in [88]. This tool is based on six modeling steps starting from system-level mission profile to component-level reliability modeling and system-level reliability modeling.…”

“…The details of mission-profile-based reliability prediction methods and the corresponding software tools can be found in [86][87][88]. A few additional aspects are discussed below:…”

Impact of Long-Term Mission Profile Sampling Rate on the Reliability Evaluation of Power Electronics in Photovoltaic Applications

“…An application-independent reliability assessment procedure has been proposed in [9] and it is employed in order to determine the component-level and system-level reliability of the PV inverter power stage, under the given mission profiles and operating conditions. Before, analyzing the lifetime estimation of the components of interest, the input mission profiles need to be translated into the main stressors that lead to the wear-out failure of the components: temperature and voltage.…”

Uncertainty analysis of capacitor reliability prediction due to uneven thermal loading in photovoltaic applications

“…2. The given method can be successfully applied for both active [9] and passive power electronic components, but within this paper it will be used in order to investigate the lifetime estimation of the capacitors/DC-bank of the study-case PV application.…”

“…4. DfR 2 reliability tool -Graphical interface [9]. reliability assessment procedure have been implemented in a tool (Design for Reliability and Robustness -DfR 2 ), as shown in Fig.…”