Reliability Assessment of a Fault-Tolerant PV Multistring Inverter

Hugues Renaudineau, Pol Paradell-Solà, Lluís Trilla, Alber Filba-Martinez, David Cardoner and José Luis Domínguez-García
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Hugues Renaudineau: Electronics Engineering Department, Universidad Técnica Federico Santa María, Valparaíso 2390123, Chile
Pol Paradell-Solà: Institut de Recerca en Energia de Catalunya, 08930 Barcelona, Spain
Lluís Trilla: Institut de Recerca en Energia de Catalunya, 08930 Barcelona, Spain
Alber Filba-Martinez: Institut de Recerca en Energia de Catalunya, 08930 Barcelona, Spain
David Cardoner: Technology Centre of Catalonia Eurecat, 08005 Barcelona, Spain
José Luis Domínguez-García: Institut de Recerca en Energia de Catalunya, 08930 Barcelona, Spain

Energies, 2020, vol. 13, issue 24, 1-13

Abstract: In photovoltaic (PV) systems, the reliability of the system components, especially the power converters, is a major concern in obtaining cost effective solutions. In order to guarantee service continuity in the case of failure of elements of the PV converter, in particular, semiconductor switching devices, a solution is to design power converter with fault-tolerance capability. This can be realized by aggregating hardware redundancy on an existing converter, providing the possibility of replacement of faulty elements. This paper evaluates the reliability of a fault-tolerant power electronics converter for PV multistring application. The considered fault-tolerant design includes a single redundant switching leg, which is used in order to reconfigure the structure in case of a switch failure either on DC-AC or DC-DC stages. This paper details the reliability estimation of the considered PV multistring fault-tolerant converter. Furthermore, a comparison with a conventional structure without fault-tolerant capability is provided. The results show that the introduction of a single redundant leg allows for improving the converter mean time to failure by a factor of almost two and it reduces, by half, the power loss due to system-failure shutdowns in PV applications, while only increasing the converter cost by 2–3%.

Keywords: fault-tolerant; markov model; multistring converter; photovoltaic; reliability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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