Probabilistic Monte-Carlo method for modelling and prediction of electronics component life

Power electronics are widely used in electric vehicles, railway locomotive and new generation aircrafts. Reliability of these components directly affect the reliability and performance of these vehicular platforms. In recent years, several research work about reliability, failure mode and aging analysis have been extensively carried out. There is a need for an efficient algorithm able to predict the life of power electronics component. In this paper, a probabilistic Monte-Carlo framework is developed and applied to predict remaining useful life of a component. Probability distributions are used to model the component’s degradation process. The modelling parameters are learned using Maximum Likelihood Estimation. The prognostic is carried out by the mean of simulation in this paper. Monte-Carlo simulation is used to propagate multiple possible degradation paths based on the current health state of the component. The remaining useful life and confident bounds are calculated by estimating mean, median and percentile descriptive statistics of the simulated degradation paths. Results from different probabilistic models are compared and their prognostic performances are evaluated

Prognostics of Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors

Insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) are the devices of choice for medium and high power, low frequency applications. IGBTs have been reported to fail under excessive electrical and thermal stresses in variable speed drives and are considered as reliability problems in wind turbines, inverters in hybrid electric vehicles and railway traction motors. There is a need to develop methods to detect anomalous behavior and predict the remaining useful life (RUL) of IGBTs to prevent system downtime and costly failures. In this study, a framework for prognostics of IGBTs was developed to provide early warnings of failure and predict the remaining useful life. The prognostic framework was implemented on non punch through (NPT) IGBTs. Power cycling of IGBTs was performed and the gate-emitter voltage, collector-emitter voltage, collector-emitter current and case temperature was monitored in-situ during aging. The on-state collector-emitter current (ICE(ON)) and collector-emitter voltage (VCE(ON)) were identified as precursors to IGBT failure. Electrical characterization and X-ray analysis was performed before and after aging to map degradation in the devices to observed trends in the precursor parameters. A Mahalanobis distance based approach was used for anomaly detection. The initial ICE(ON) and VCE(ON) parameters were used to compute the healthy MD distance. This healthy MD distance was transformed and the mean and standard deviation of the transformed MD data was obtained. The μ+3σ upper bound obtained from the transformed healthy MD was then used as a threshold for anomaly detection. This approach was able to detect anomalous behavior in IGBTs before failure. Upon anomaly detection, a particle filter approach was used for predicting the remaining useful life of the IGBTs. A system model was developed using the degradation trend of the VCE(ON) parameter. This model was obtained by a least squares regression of the IGBT degradation curve. The tracking and prediction performance of the model with the particle filter was demonstrated

Prognostics and health management of power electronics

Prognostics and health management (PHM) is a major tool enabling systems to evaluate their reliability in real-time operation. Despite ground-breaking advances in most engineering and scientific disciplines during the past decades, reliability engineering has not seen significant breakthroughs or noticeable advances. Therefore, self-awareness of the embedded system is also often required in the sense that the system should be able to assess its own health state and failure records, and those of its main components, and take action appropriately. This thesis presents a radically new prognostics approach to reliable system design that will revolutionise complex power electronic systems with robust prognostics capability enhanced Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors (IGBT) in applications where reliability is significantly challenging and critical. The IGBT is considered as one of the components that is mainly damaged in converters and experiences a number of failure mechanisms, such as bond wire lift off, die attached solder crack, loose gate control voltage, etc. The resulting effects mentioned are complex. For instance, solder crack growth results in increasing the IGBT’s thermal junction which becomes a source of heat turns to wire bond lift off. As a result, the indication of this failure can be seen often in increasing on-state resistance relating to the voltage drop between on-state collector-emitter. On the other hand, hot carrier injection is increased due to electrical stress. Additionally, IGBTs are components that mainly work under high stress, temperature and power consumptions due to the higher range of load that these devices need to switch. This accelerates the degradation mechanism in the power switches in discrete fashion till reaches failure state which fail after several hundred cycles. To this end, exploiting failure mechanism knowledge of IGBTs and identifying failure parameter indication are background information of developing failure model and prognostics algorithm to calculate remaining useful life (RUL) along with ±10% confidence bounds. A number of various prognostics models have been developed for forecasting time to failure of IGBTs and the performance of the presented estimation models has been evaluated based on two different evaluation metrics. The results show significant improvement in health monitoring capability for power switches.Furthermore, the reliability of the power switch was calculated and conducted to fully describe health state of the converter and reconfigure the control parameter using adaptive algorithm under degradation and load mission limitation. As a result, the life expectancy of devices has been increased. These all allow condition-monitoring facilities to minimise stress levels and predict future failure which greatly reduces the likelihood of power switch failures in the first place

Computationally efficient, real-time, and embeddable prognostic techniques for power electronics

Power electronics are increasingly important in new generation vehicles as critical safety mechanical subsystems are being replaced with more electronic components. Hence, it is vital that the health of these power electronic components is monitored for safety and reliability on a platform. The aim of this paper is to develop a prognostic approach for predicting the remaining useful life of power electronic components. The developed algorithms must also be embeddable and computationally efficient to support on-board real-time decision making. Current state-of-the-art prognostic algorithms, notably those based on Markov models, are computationally intensive and not applicable to real-time embedded applications. In this paper, an isolated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) is used as a case study for prognostic development. The proposed approach is developed by analyzing failure mechanisms and statistics of IGBT degradation data obtained from an accelerated aging experiment. The approach explores various probability distributions for modeling discrete degradation profiles of the IGBT component. This allows the stochastic degradation model to be efficiently simulated, in this particular example ~1000 times more efficiently than Markov approaches

Switching Parameters Characterization of Aged IGBTs by Thermo-Electrical Overstress

This paper presents an experimental study and reports the monitored changes in the switching parameters (quoted in datasheets) of Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors (IGBTs) when subjected to accelerated ageing through thermo-electrical overstress. The study describes how the accelerated ageing strategy was implemented. Tested IGBTs were characterized before and after accelerated ageing. Details are presented of the IGBT switching parameters characterization setup and the employed Double Pulse technique. Furthermore, the corresponding monitored changes in the turn-off delay time, fall time, energy loss during fall time, turn-off rate of change of collector voltage, turnon delay time, rise time, energy loss during rise time, turn-on rate of change of collector current, reverse recovery time, peak reverse recovery current and energy loss during reverse recovery are presented and discussed

Accelerated Aging System for Prognostics of Power Semiconductor Devices

Prognostics is an engineering discipline that focuses on estimation of the health state of a component and the prediction of its remaining useful life (RUL) before failure. Health state estimation is based on actual conditions and it is fundamental for the prediction of RUL under anticipated future usage. Failure of electronic devices is of great concern as future aircraft will see an increase of electronics to drive and control safety-critical equipment throughout the aircraft. Therefore, development of prognostics solutions for electronics is of key importance. This paper presents an accelerated aging system for gate-controlled power transistors. This system allows for the understanding of the effects of failure mechanisms, and the identification of leading indicators of failure which are essential in the development of physics-based degradation models and RUL prediction. In particular, this system isolates electrical overstress from thermal overstress. Also, this system allows for a precise control of internal temperatures, enabling the exploration of intrinsic failure mechanisms not related to the device packaging. By controlling the temperature within safe operation levels of the device, accelerated aging is induced by electrical overstress only, avoiding the generation of thermal cycles. The temperature is controlled by active thermal-electric units. Several electrical and thermal signals are measured in-situ and recorded for further analysis in the identification of leading indicators of failures. This system, therefore, provides a unique capability in the exploration of different failure mechanisms and the identification of precursors of failure that can be used to provide a health management solution for electronic devices

Prognostics for Electronics Components of Avionics Systems

Electronics components have and increasingly critical role in avionics systems and for the development of future aircraft systems. Prognostics of such components is becoming a very important research filed as a result of the need to provide aircraft systems with system level health management. This paper reports on a prognostics application for electronics components of avionics systems, in particular, its application to the Isolated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT). The remaining useful life prediction for the IGBT is based on the particle filter framework, leveraging data from an accelerated aging tests on IGBTs. The accelerated aging test provided thermal-electrical overstress by applying thermal cycling to the device. In-situ state monitoring, including measurements of the steady-state voltages and currents, electrical transients, and thermal transients are recorded and used as potential precursors of failure

Data driven prognostics for predicting remaining useful life of IGBT

Power electronic devices such IGBT (Integrated Gate Bipolar Transistor) are used in wide range of applications such as automotive, aerospace and telecommunications. The ability to predict degradation of power electronic components can minimise the risk of their failure while in operation. Research in this area aims to develop prognostics strategies for predicting degradation behaviour, failure modes and mechanisms, and remaining useful life of these electronic components. In this paper, data driven prognostics approaches based on Neural Network (NN) and Adaptive Neuro Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS) models are developed and used to predict the degradation of an IGBT device. IGBT life data under thermal overstress load condition with square signal gate voltage bias, available from NASA prognostics data repository, is used to demonstrate the proposed data-driven prognostics strategy. The monitored collector-emitter voltage is used to identify the pattern and duration of different phases in the applied voltage load. The NN and ANFIS models are trained with a subset of the test data to predict remaining useful life (RUL) of the IGBT device under varying load test profiles. The predictive capability and performance of the models is observed and analysed

Towards Prognostics for Electronics Components

Electronics components have an increasingly critical role in avionics systems and in the development of future aircraft systems. Prognostics of such components is becoming a very important research field as a result of the need to provide aircraft systems with system level health management information. This paper focuses on a prognostics application for electronics components within avionics systems, and in particular its application to an Isolated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT). This application utilizes the remaining useful life prediction, accomplished by employing the particle filter framework, leveraging data from accelerated aging tests on IGBTs. These tests induced thermal-electrical overstresses by applying thermal cycling to the IGBT devices. In-situ state monitoring, including measurements of steady-state voltages and currents, electrical transients, and thermal transients are recorded and used as potential precursors of failure