An Overview of Lifetime Management of Power Electronic Converters

Abstract

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.