| Abstract |
The lifespan of a wind power system is highly influenced by the reliable operation of its power converter. This paper investigates the failure rate and annual consumed damage for a 2 MW direct-drive permanent magnet synchronous generator (PMSG) based power converter in a wind power generation system. The reliability assessment mainly focuses on the component level, namely, diodes and IGBTs, in the machine-side converter (MSC). Annual damages and power cycles for semiconductors are calculated separately under long-term thermal cycles (several minutes to several hours) and short-term thermal cycles (dozens to hundreds of milli-second). A comparison result between different thermal cycles are given and discussed in detail. To ensure an effective lifetime evaluation of the entire converter system, a Monte Carlo method is used to generate the lifetime distributions and entire unreliability functions for power semiconductors. Final B10 and B1 lifetimes can be easily observed from the cumulative distribution functions (CDFs). |
