Reliability and Risk Assessment in a Power Electronic Based Power System (PEPS): Using Non-Constant Failure Rates of Converters

In this paper, conventional power system reliability and risk indices are employed to evaluate the reliability of a Power Electronic based Power System (PEPS) utilizing Physics of Failure (PoF) based reliability functions. Mission profile based methods have presented to estimate the failure probability of converters which implies non-constant failure rates for converters during operating period. Hence, a piece-wise solution is proposed to employ the Markov chain approach in order to evaluate the system level reliability of the PEPS with the non-constant failure rates. Furthermore, the impact of power management and thermal sharing on the system level reliability are studied. Numerical analyses and experiments are provided to validate the proposed approaches.