A Study on the Lifetime of Q2L-MMC-DAB’s Switches for Wind Turbine Applications
Paper in proceeding, 2020

This paper studies the lifetime of semiconductor switches of a dual-active-bridge (DAB) DC-DC converter for wind turbine applications. Quasi-two-level operating modular multilevel converters (MMC) are used as the building blocks of the DAB converter. One of the established lifetime models is used for the lifetime estimation of the switches. Measurement data of an onshore wind turbine for three hundred days is used as the mission profile. It is shown that the short-term thermal cycles (cycles with frequency in the range of switching frequency) are detrimental to the lifetime estimation of the auxiliary switches of the MMCs’ submodules. Thus, neglecting the short-term thermal cycles will overestimate the lifetime of the auxiliary switches by several orders of magnitude. On the other hand, these cycles will not affect the lifetime of the bypass switches considerably. It is also shown that the thermal stress on the secondary-side auxiliary switches is more severe than the primary-side ones. It is suggested that two parallel devices should be used for the secondary-side auxiliary switches; as a consequence, a reasonable lifetime is achieved for the secondary-side auxiliary switches.

three-phase dual-active-bridge (DAB)

DC-DC power conversion

reliability

thermal stress

modular multilevel converter (MMC)

Author

Babak Alikhanzadehalamdari

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Electric Power Engineering

Chengjun Tang

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Electric Power Engineering

Torbjörn Thiringer

Chalmers, Electrical Engineering, Electric Power Engineering

2020 15th International Conference on Ecological Vehicles and Renewable Energies, EVER 2020

9243073

2020 Fifteenth International Conference on Ecological Vehicles and Renewable Energies (EVER)
Monte-Carlo, Monaco,

Increasing the value of Hydropower through increased Flexibility (HYDROFLEX)

European Commission (EC) (EC/H2020/764011), 2018-05-01 -- 2022-05-01.

Power Electronic based dc transformer for off-shore wind energy installations

Swedish Energy Agency (2016-007963), 2017-01-01 -- 2020-12-31.

Areas of Advance

Energy

Subject Categories

Energy Systems

Other Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering

DOI

10.1109/EVER48776.2020.9243073

More information

Latest update

4/21/2023