Reliability Analysis and Repair Activity for the Components of 350 kW Inverters in a Large Scale Grid-Connected Photovoltaic System

Spertino, Filippo; Amato, Angela; Casali, Gabriele; Ciocia, Alessandro; Malgaroli, Gabriele

doi:10.3390/electronics10050564

Cited by 21 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) represents the expected time to failure for a non-repairable system. A larger MTTF indicates higher reliability and a lower failure rate [63].…”

Section: A Component Level Lifetime Predictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…FTA is an analytical technique that applies a top-down approach to analyze the various system combinations of hardware, software, and human failures as sub-events that may cause the system failure as the top event [37,128]. This method classifies the events as initiating fault events, intermediate events, and top events and uses logic gates such as AND, OR, etc., to transform the component-level lifetime data to the system-level (Fig 26(b)) [19,25,63].…”

Section: System Level Lifetime Prediction Metodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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An Overview of Lifetime Management of Power Electronic Converters

et al. 2022

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An expected lifetime of converters is of great importance for optimal decision-making in the planning of modern Power Electronic (PE) systems. Hence, the lifetime management of power electronic systems has attracted a lot of attention in academia and industry. This paper is a guideline for managing the lifetime of power converters. Analyzing the different kinds of failures, failure modes and their corresponding mechanisms are investigated in the first section along with the failure data needed as input parameters of the assessment. In the second section, lifetime prediction in two aspects of component-level and system level is discussed and all the possible techniques to achieve them are investigated and compared. All the steps required to predict the lifetime in the component-level including electrothermal modeling, cycle counting, lifetime model, damage accumulation, parameter estimation, and lifetime distribution are described and then system level methods consisting of reliability block diagrams, fault-tree analysis, and Markov chains are examined and compared. The last section contains the roadmap of the lifetime extension including the reliable design and condition monitoring. INDEX TERMSReliability, Lifetime management, Lifetime analysis, Lifetime prediction, Lifetime extension, Empirical model, Physics of failure, failure mechanism FIGURE 1. Guideline of the reliability of power electronic systems.

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“…Mean Time to Failure (MTTF) represents the expected time to failure for a non-repairable system. A larger MTTF indicates higher reliability and a lower failure rate [63].…”

Section: A Component Level Lifetime Predictionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: System Level Lifetime Prediction Metodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Overview of Lifetime Management of Power Electronic Converters

et al. 2022

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“…The fault tree analysis may reflect the operation characteristics of the analysis target by logically using the relationship between the causes of system failure to create a fault tree and calculating the probability of system failure. Therefore, logical and probabilistic quantitative results can be derived [22][23][24][25][26][27][28].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reliability Analysis of a Multilevel Inverter Applied to Stratospheric Drones Using Fault Tree Analysis

Lee,

Jun,

Park

et al. 2023

Electronics

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Stratospheric drones operating in extreme environments are very important for predicting reliability and are high-efficiency, high-performance, and lightweight power units. Multilevel inverters are suitable for application as power conversion units for stratospheric drones. A guideline is needed to evaluate whether it is suitable for practical application from a reliability perspective among various multilevel topologies. Existing reliability prediction models cannot reflect the operating characteristics of multilevel inverters. In this paper, we analyze the driving characteristics of each topology from the perspective of half-bride, which is the basic configuration of multilevel inverters, and we propose a fault tree analysis (FTA) design with three operating modes. The proposed method has the advantage of being able to easily analyze the failure rate by expanding to single-phase and three-phase and to analyze the failure rate according to changes in modulation index (MI) and power factor (PF). The failure rates of the proposed method and the part count method are analyzed using MIL-HDBK-217F. We also analyze the impact of different various operating characteristics on the failure rate. From a reliability perspective, we provide a variety of guidelines for selecting a multilevel topology that fits the operation conditions.

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“…Furthermore, based on an industry-based survey in [13], the most vulnerable components in power converters are semiconductor power devices, which contribute to about 31% of all power converter failures. Another study based on the literature, which considered 132 inverters used in large-scale gridconnected photovoltaic systems (with an AC-rated power of 350 kW each), also showed that the highest mean time to repair (MTTR) was for IGBTs [14]. So, these aspects show the importance of detecting transistor faults, which can occur in any commercial converter and any type of application.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Incipient Fault Diagnosis of a Grid-Connected T-Type Multilevel Inverter Using Multilayer Perceptron and Walsh Transform

et al. 2023

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This article deals with fault detection and the classification of incipient and intermittent open-transistor faults in grid-connected three-level T-type inverters. Normally, open-transistor detection algorithms are developed for permanent faults. Nevertheless, the difficulty to detect incipient and intermittent faults is much greater, and appropriate methods are required. This requirement is due to the fact that over time, its repetition may lead to permanent failures that may lead to irreversible degradation. Therefore, the early detection of these failures is very important to ensure the reliability of the system and avoid unscheduled stops. For diagnosing these incipient and intermittent faults, a novel method based on a Walsh transform combined with a multilayer perceptron (MLP)-based classifier is proposed in this paper. This non-classical approach of using the Walsh transform not only allows accurate detections but is also very fast. This last characteristic is very important in these applications due to their practical implementation. The proposed method includes two main steps. First, the acquired AC currents are used by the control system and processed using the Walsh transform. This results in detailed information used to potentially identify open-transistor faults. Then, such information is processed using the MLP to finally determine whether a fault is present or not. Several experiments are conducted with different types of incipient transistor faults to create a relevant dataset.

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Reliability Analysis and Repair Activity for the Components of 350 kW Inverters in a Large Scale Grid-Connected Photovoltaic System

Cited by 21 publications

References 33 publications

An Overview of Lifetime Management of Power Electronic Converters

An Overview of Lifetime Management of Power Electronic Converters

Reliability Analysis of a Multilevel Inverter Applied to Stratospheric Drones Using Fault Tree Analysis

Incipient Fault Diagnosis of a Grid-Connected T-Type Multilevel Inverter Using Multilayer Perceptron and Walsh Transform

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