Design, Monitoring and Control of Reliable Power Electronics

Abstract: Design, monitoring, and control are three key aspects to fulfill reliability and availability targets of power electronic systems. The first part of this tutorial will focus on the reliability-oriented design prospective and the necessary too, such as component-level and system-level lifetime and reliability modeling. It is used to support decision making in the design phase of power electronic converter systems. Design for reliability concept and the term mission profile will be introduced. State-of-the-art component-level understanding of failure mechanisms, models, and system-level predictability will be discussed. There are different methods available for lifetime and reliability prediction techniques. The underlying assumptions made in each modeling step and the corresponding limitations will be uncovered. Throughout the tutorial, several power electronic converter case studies will be used to illustrate the introduced concepts and methodologies. The second part of the tutorial introduces technologies for electrothermal real-time monitoring, localized degradation diagnosis, and active thermal control yielding enhanced lifetime. First, it is discussed how junction temperature sensing and compact 3-D thermal models can be efficiently combined in accurate and high–bandwidth electrothermal monitoring systems. By estimating 3-D distributed temperatures and losses of power modules, the monitoring system detects of critical temperatures throughout the power module and enables a converter operation with dynamic peak power rating. After reviewing state-of-the-art condition monitoring techniques, advanced methods for detection and quantization of localized degradation are introduced. They identify changes of the device loss behavior as well as of the thermal impedances during normal converter operation and correlate them to degradation mechanisms. This guarantees reliable and safe converter operation through early diagnosis of critical degradation and timely initiation of predictive maintenance. Finally, techniques for active control of junction temperatures are discussed that increase the reliability and service life of power electronic modules. They directly reduce thermally induced strain and simultaneously decrease fatigue. The tutorial will demonstrate how reliability-oriented design, thermal and degradation monitoring as well as lifetime enhancing control are crucial technologies that work hand-in-hand to ensure safe and reliable operation of next generation converters over a long lifetime.

Christoph H. van der Broeck is currently chief engineer at the Institute for Power Electronics and Electrical Drives (ISEA) of RWTH Aachen University, Germany, where he is head of the Reliable Power Electronics Systems group. He received the B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. Degree in electrical engineering from RWTH Aachen University in 2010, 2013 and 2018. From 2011 to 2012 and 2017 to 2018 he joined the Wisconsin Electric Machine and Power Electronic Consortium (WEMPEC) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, as a Fulbright and DAAD scholar and worked on monitoring and control technologies for electrical power conversion systems. In the last three years he published 14 papers on various technologies on reliabilityoriented multi-physics modeling, real-time monitoring and lifetime enhancing control of power electronics. In 2018 he received the W. Portnoy 2nd Best Paper Award of the IEEE IAS for his work on IGBT junction temperature sensing.

Huai Wang is currently an Associate Professor at the Center of Reliable Power Electronics (CORPE), Aalborg University, Denmark. His research addresses the fundamental challenges in power electronic component failure mechanism modelling and validation, and application issues in system-level predictability, condition monitoring, circuit architecture, and robustness design. He has lectured more than 20 tutorials at leading power electronic conferences on the above topics. He was a short-term visiting scientist with the ETH Zurich, Switzerland, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA. He was with the ABB Corporate Research Center, Baden, Switzerland, in 2009. Dr. Wang received the Richard M. Bass Outstanding Young Power Electronics Engineer Award from the IEEE Power Electronics Society in 2016, for the contribution to reliability of power electronic converter systems. He serves as an Associate Editor of IET Power Electronics, IET Electronics Letters, IEEE Journal of Emerging and Selected Topics in Power Electronics, and IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics.

Frede Blaabjerg is currently a Professor with the Department of Energy Technology and the Director of Center of Reliable Power Electronics (CORPE), Aalborg University, Denmark. He has intensive research work on power electronics and its applications in motor drives, wind turbines, PV systems, harmonics, and the reliability of power electronic systems. He has held more than 300 lectures national and international, most of them in the last decade are invited and as keynotes at conferences, covering various topics on power electronics, including the reliability. He was a Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Power Electronics Society from 2005 to 2007 and for the IEEE Industry Applications Society from 2010 to 2011. Dr. Blaabjerg received the IEEE William E. Newell Power Electronics Award in 2014, the IEEE PELS Distinguished Service Award in 2009, the Outstanding Young Power Electronics Engineer Award in 1998, and 15 IEEE Prize Paper Awards. He is the current President of IEEE Power Electronics Society.

Rik W. De Doncker is Professor at RWTH Aachen University, Germany, since 1996 and is currently director of the Institute for Power Electronics and Electrical Drives (ISEA) and the E.ON Energy Research Center. He is leading various research activities on highly integrated power converters and machines for next generation electric vehicles as well as on power converters for future dc-distribution grids. These include strong research efforts to make future power electronics more safe and reliable. After receiving his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, in 1986, he was appointed as a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1987. In 1989 he joined the Corporate Research and Development Center, General Electric Company, Schenectady, NY. Between 1994 and 1996 he was Vice President of Technology at Silicon Power Corporation, a former division of General Electric Inc. Dr. De Doncker was the President of the IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) in 2005 and 2006. In 2002, he was the recipient of the IEEE IAS Outstanding Achievement Award. In 2008, he received the IEEE PES Nari Hingorani Custom Power Award. In 2010, he received an honorary doctor degree of TU Riga, Latvia. In 2013, he received the IEEE William E. Newell Power Electronics Award.