Reliability Modelling of Power Electronics with Mission Profile Forecasting for Long-Term Planning

The power electronics system reliability is strongly dependent on the environmental and operating conditions at the installation site. During the reliability modelling, a mission profile-based procedure is traditionally employed to account for this dependency. To accurately estimate the reliability, mission profiles need to include the low resolution time intervals (e.g., several minutes per sample). The main forecasting challenge is the accurate prediction of such profiles for long-term prediction horizons, such as several years ahead. Therefore, in this paper, a mission profile forecasting method suitable for long-term reliability-oriented planning is proposed. The benefit of this method includes multi-year mission profile prediction with high time resolution (i.e., 1 minute per sample) suitable for power electronics reliability studies. A case study reveals that the proposed forecasting method enables power electronics modelling with less than 5% relative error in reliability estimation over different time horizons.