Reliability evaluation of power capacitors in a wind turbine system

With the increasing penetration of wind power, reliable and cost-effective wind energy production is of more and more importance. The doubly-fed induction generator based partial-scale wind power converter is still dominating in the existing wind farms. In this paper, the reliability assessment of power capacitors is studied considering the annual mission profile. According to an electro-thermal stress evaluation, the time-to-failure distribution of both the dc-link capacitor and ac-side filter capacitor is detailed investigated. Aiming for the systemlevel reliability analysis, a reliability block diagram is used to bridge the gap between the Weibull distribution based component-level individual capacitor and the capacitor bank. A case study of a 2 MW wind power converter shows that the lifetime is significantly reduced from the individual capacitor to the capacitor bank. Besides, the dc-link capacitor bank dominates the lifetime consumption.