Power semiconductor lifetime estimation considering dynamics of wind turbine

In the time of increasing power capacity of a single wind turbine, the wind power converter is considered as the most failure-prone component. Since, the wind turbine faces randomly varying wind speed, special grid conditions and faults, a strong effort is required to achieve highly reliable performance of power electronics. In order to predict the semiconductors lifetime, one must bring into focus the power converter mission profile and indicate the failure contribution by different loading conditions. Since, the previous studies have tended to focus only on specific or repeating loading conditions, a more complete and realistic mission profile needs to be generated. In this paper the focus is on the development of the model for the loading profile generation which takes into account the dynamics of the wind turbine. This model allows transforming the wind speed variations into the converter power variations. The lifetime is calculated for a three different IGBT joints, which are more prone to failure. The lifetime is expressed in terms of B<inf>10</inf>lifetime.