Mission Profile Based Reliability Evaluation of Building Blocks for Modular Power Converters

Abstract

The major challenge of the power electronics design is to be cost effective while fulfilling the reliability requirements.Since the thermal cycling is one of the most severe causes of failure in power electronics, this paper presents a test bench for the thermal testing of power converters.This is particularly important for modular power converters consisting of several building blocks, which cannot be tested easily.For thermal design evaluation it is proposed to test the building blocks under real mission profiles.As a study case, the thermal behavior of an Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC) is given to demonstrate the approach.