Abstract
Capacitive DC links are an important part in voltage source power electronic converters, which contribute to cost, size and failure rate on a considerable scale. With more and more stringent constraints brought by industrial applications, the capacitive DC links encounter reliability aspect challenges. This paper presents a review on the reliability design and improvement of capacitive DC links from three aspects: 1) Quantitative reliability prediction for DC-link capacitors; 2) Reliability-oriented design of passive DC-link capacitor banks; and 3) Advanced active DC links to exceed the limits of passive DC-link capacitors. Key solutions for each aspect are highlighted and discussed with case studies. This review serves to provide a picture of state-of-the-art research on the reliability design and improvement of capacitive DC links, highlight the key milestones in this area, and identify the corresponding challenges and future research directions.
Highlights
Capacitive DC links are widely used in power electronic systems to filter the harmonic currents, buffer the instantaneous power difference between the input source and output load, and minimize the voltage variation in the DC link[1]
The results reveal that a few types of active DC links can achieve lower inverter design cost compared to a passive DC link in the scenario of a relatively high reliability requirement, which is relevant to many industry applications
The scientific challenges and existing studies on capacitive DC links are discussed in this paper
Summary
Capacitive DC links are widely used in power electronic systems to filter the harmonic currents, buffer the instantaneous power difference between the input source and output load, and minimize the voltage variation in the DC link[1]. The most commonly used passive DC links are capacitive ones, which are one of the highest failure rate components in power electronic systems and contributes to more than 20% failures in certain applications[7]. It reveals that the DC-link capacitors contribute to the highest failure probability among other components and mostly determine the lifetime of the power electronic system. Active DC links with power electronic circuit to exceed the physical limits of the passive DC-link capacitors are reviewed. The structure of this paper is as follows: Section 2 presents the reliability prediction of capacitors with physical of failure understanding; Section 3 and 4 present the advanced technologies for reliability improvement in terms of passive and active DC links, followed by the conclusions
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