Stochastic RUL calculation enhanced with TDNN-based IGBT failure modeling

Power electronics are widely used in the transport and energy sectors. Hence, the reliability of these power electronic components is critical to reducing the maintenance cost of these assets. It is vital that the health of these components is monitored for increasing the safety and availability of a system. The aim of this paper is to develop a prognostic technique for estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) of power electronic components. There is a need for an efficient prognostic algorithm that is embeddable and able to support on-board real-time decision-making. A time delay neural network (TDNN) is used in the development of failure modes for an insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT). Initially, the time delay neural network is constructed from training IGBTs' ageing samples. A stochastic process is performed for the estimation results to compute the probability of the health state during the degradation process. The proposed TDNN fusion with a statistical approach benefits the probability distribution function by improving the accuracy of the results of the TDDN in RUL prediction. The RUL (i.e., mean and confidence bounds) is then calculated from the simulation of the estimated degradation states. The prognostic results are evaluated using root mean square error (RMSE) and relative accuracy (RA) prognostic evaluation metrics

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

Adaptive response surface method supporting finite element calculations: an application to power electronic module reliability assessment

In this paper a method is proposed, introducing an adaptive response surface allowing, on the one hand, to minimize the number of calls to finite element codes for the assessment of the parameters of the response surface and, on the other hand, to refine the solution around the design point by iterating through the procedure. This method is implemented in a parallel environment to optimize the calculation time with respect of the architecture of a computational cluster

Review of Health Prognostics and Condition Monitoring of Electronic Components

To meet the specifications of low cost, highly reliable electronic devices, fault diagnosis techniques play an essential role. It is vital to find flaws at an early stage in design, components, material, or manufacturing during the initial phase. This review paper attempts to summarize past development and recent advances in the areas about green manufacturing, maintenance, remaining useful life (RUL) prediction, and like. The current state of the art in reliability research for electronic components, mainly includes failure mechanisms, condition monitoring, and residual lifetime evaluation is explored. A critical analysis of reliability studies to identify their relative merits and usefulness of the outcome of these studies' vis-a-vis green manufacturing is presented. The wide array of statistical, empirical, and intelligent tools and techniques used in the literature are then identified and mapped. Finally, the findings are summarized, and the central research gap is highlighted

Sintered silver finite element modelling and reliability based design optimisation in power electronic module

This paper discusses the design for reliability of a sintered silver structure in a power electronic module based on the computational approach that composed of high fidelity analysis, reduced order modelling, numerical risk analysis, and optimisation. The methodology was demonstrated on sintered silver interconnect sandwiched between silicon carbide chip and copper substrate in a power electronic module. In particular, sintered silver reliability due to thermal fatigue material degradation is one of the main concerns. Thermo-mechanical behaviour of the power module sintered silver joint structure is simulated by finite element analysis for cyclic temperature loading profile in order to capture the strain distribution. The discussion was on methods for approximate reduced order modelling based on interpolation techniques using Kriging and radial basis functions. The reduced order modelling approach uses prediction data for the thermo-mechanical behaviour. The fatigue lifetime of the sintered silver interconnect and the warpage of the interconnect layer was particular interest in this study. The reduced order models were used for the analysis of the effect of design uncertainties on the reliability of the sintered silver layer. To assess the effect of uncertain design data, a method for estimating the variation of reliability related metrics namely Latin Hypercube sampling was utilised. The product capability indices are evaluated from the distributions fitted to the histogram resulting from Latin Hypercube sampling technique. A reliability based design optimisation was demonstrated using Particle Swarm Optimisation algorithm for constraint optimisation task consists of optimising two different characteristic performance metrics such as the thermo-mechanical plastic strain accumulation per cycle on the sintered layer and the thermally induced warpage

Reliability Analysis of Electrotechnical Devices

This is a book on the practical approaches of reliability to electrotechnical devices and systems. It includes the electromagnetic effect, radiation effect, environmental effect, and the impact of the manufacturing process on electronic materials, devices, and boards

Photovoltaic Module Reliability Workshop 2010: February 18-19, 2010

NREL's Photovoltaic (PV) Module Reliability Workshop (PVMRW) brings together PV reliability experts to share information, leading to the improvement of PV module reliability. Such improvement reduces the cost of solar electricity and promotes investor confidence in the technology--both critical goals for moving PV technologies deeper into the electricity marketplace