Modeling lifetime of high power IGBTs in wind power applications - An overview

Abstract

The wind power industry is continuously developing bringing to the market larger and larger wind turbines. Nowadays reliability is more of a concern than in the past especially for the offshore wind turbines since the access to offshore wind turbines in case of failures is both costly and difficult. Lifetime modeling of future large wind turbines is needed in order to make reliability predictions about these new wind turbines early in the design phase. By doing reliability prediction in the design phase the manufacturer can ensure that the new wind turbines will live long enough. This paper represents an overview of the different aspects of lifetime modeling of high power IGBTs in wind power applications. In the beginning, wind turbine reliability survey results are briefly reviewed in order to gain an insight into wind turbine subassembly failure rates and associated downtimes. After that the most common high power IGBT failure mechanisms and lifetime prediction models are reviewed in more detail.

A Heuristic Method to Improve Power Cycling Related Lifetime in Series Connectable Modular Full-Bridge Inverter

“…where N f is the number of cycles to failure of the switch, A is a fitting constant (650790 K), α is a fitting constant (-4.67), E a is the activation energy (9.89 •10 −20 J), and k B is the Boltzmann constant (1.38 •10 −23 J •K −1 ). It should be noted that although there are other lifetime models as reviewed in [18], the lifetime prediction resulted by the other models should be similar to the Coffin-Manson model.…”

Reliability Assessment of Solder Joints in Power Electronic Modules by Crack Damage Model for Wind Turbine Applications

“…Main failure mechanisms for IGBT devices are solder cracking between DCB ceramic upper layer and chip, solder cracking between DCB ceramic lower layer and base plate, bond wire lift off and bond wire heel cracking (see [11,12] for failure mechanism description and explanations).…”

Influence of the clamping force on the power cycling lifetime reliability of press pack IGBT sub‐module

“…M. Ciappa [5] analysis and the nine kinds of IGBT modules’ failure modes, which is of guiding significance for the study of the failure mode of the PP IGBTs. C. Busca [6] summarised the failure mechanism of IGBT, various life models for semiconductor modules, and the concept of task curve and accelerated life test, so as to provide references to select the life prediction model of PP IGBTs and predict fatigue life. Pressure is a very important parameter of IGBT devices.…”