Abstract
The thermal dynamics of power semiconductors and power capacitors are closely related to the reliability and affect the cost of power electronic converter. However, the component loading in a wind turbine system is disturbed by many factors of the power converter, which presents various time constants from microseconds to hours. To determine the system availability in such system is a challenge and need detailed analysis. In the case of a mission profile with 1-hour sample rate, a simplified circuit model, loss model, and thermal model of the active power switches and passive capacitors are needed and described. According to the long-term electrothermal profile, the percentile lifetime of a single component can be predicted. The Weibull function based time-to-failure distribution can then be used to link from component-level to converter-level reliability. From analysis of a 2 MW wind turbine system, it can be seen that the dc-link capacitor bank dominates the converter-level reliability.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 9018135 |
| Journal | I E E E Transactions on Industry Applications |
| Volume | 56 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| Pages (from-to) | 2938-2944 |
| Number of pages | 7 |
| ISSN | 0093-9994 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - May 2020 |
Keywords
- Power capacitors
- power electronics
- power semi-conductor devices
- reliability estimation
- wind power generation