Condition Monitoring Power Electronics for Reliability (COMPERE)

电力电子转换器是许多安全关键、高可靠性、在不确定和恶劣环境中工作的电气系统的关键元件。例子包括航空航天电源和伺服转换器、船舶推进和牵引驱动以及海上可再生能源发电系统。实现高可靠性的传统方法是降低半导体器件的速率，并在系统配置中包含冗余。这些方法可以增加转换器的平均故障间隔时间，但不能防止灾难性故障的发生。这项研究的目的是开发一种新的方法来监控一段时间内的转换器设备退化，并提供在故障发生之前进行预测的能力。这项研究将解决执行和理解关键测量结果的挑战，以便获得有关半导体器件在实时操作条件下的内部状态的信息。将研究导致器件老化和失效的机理，并建立器件状态与其端子特性之间的关系。状态监测技术将基于变流器端子电信号，这些电信号与关于变流器系统的热和负载条件的信息一起被解释。将在热、低频和高频电气领域进行实验、计算机建模和仿真，以发展状态监测技术。研究结果将对设备制造商、电力电子转换器制造商和此类系统的最终用户，特别是关键应用中的最终用户具有重要价值。

Power Electronic Converters are key elements in many safety-critical, high-reliability, electrical systems working in uncertain and harsh environments. Examples include aerospace power supplies and servo converters, marine propulsion and traction drives, and offshore renewable energy generator systems. The traditional approaches to achieve high converter reliability are to de-rate the semiconductor devices and to include redundancy in the system configuration. These approaches can increase the Mean Time Between Failures of converters but will not prevent a catastrophic failure from happening. The aim of this research is to develop a new approach of monitoring the converter device degradation over a period of time and provide the ability to predict failures before they happen. The research will address the challenges of carrying out and understanding the results of key measurements in order to derive information about the internal state of the semiconductor devices in real-time operating conditions. The mechanisms leading to the aging and failure of the devices will be investigated, and a relationship between the device condition and its terminal characteristics established. Condition monitoring techniques will be based on converter terminal electrical signals, which are interpreted together with information about the thermal and load conditions of the converter system. Experiment, and computer modelling and simulation in the thermal, low frequency and high frequency electrical domains will be carried out to develop the condition monitoring techniques. The results will be valuable to device manufacturers, manufacturers of power electronic converters, and to the end users of such systems, particularly in critical applications.