Abstract
In this paper, a comprehensive formulation of reliability models for active and passive power components (i.e., capacitors and power semiconductor devices (MOSFETS)) of a regulated transformer rectifier unit (RTRU) for more electric aircraft application is presented. Additionally, the work focuses on the reliability analysis and evaluation at the system level for a non-modular discrete MOSFET based auxiliary power supply unit for more-electric-aircraft. A rigorous quantitative assessment of reliability, volume and power loss is carried out at the component level as well as system level, verifying how a particular design relates to the specific performance parameters. Keeping this as a motivation, this paper also focuses on studying and analyzing the inter-relation among reliability and other performance metrics such as power density and efficiency taking a 3kW RTRU as an example design. The major metrics under consideration for this study are the failure in time (FIT), mean time to failure (MTTF), power density, efficiency while keeping the eye on most failure prone elements of the power converter - capacitors and active power semiconductors. A comprehensive quantitative evaluation based on thermal management size, system reliability is done on choice of the switching semiconductors where the candidate pool includes Si and SiC MOSFET technologies. From the analysis on three different types of widely used capacitors - film, ceramic, aluminum electrolytic, it is concluded that the optimum choices of capacitors for high voltage DC link and low-voltage output belong to Aluminum and Ceramic types, respectively. Finally, the optimum selection of power stage components is derived from the extensive evaluation of the overall RTRU system in terms of system size and reliability.
Highlights
The impending trends in the global demand of more electric aircrafts with higher efficiency, high power density, and high degree of compactness has opened up numerous opportunities in front of avionics industries to develop innovative efficient and at the same time reliable power electronic interfaces
In order to avoid the aforementioned issues of the conventional transformer rectifier units (TRU), an alternative approach is to design a regulated transformer rectifier unit (RTRU) [5] using an actively controlled three-phase AC/DC power factor correction (PFC) [6,7,8,9] and rectification stage followed by a DC/DC isolated converter stage [10,11,12,13,14,15,16] for generation more-electric airplanes (MEAs)
Based on the comprehensive quantitative evaluation of Si and SiC metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) technologies, this work shows that SiC MOSFETs reduce the thermal management burden significantly with a little compromise on the reliability
Summary
The impending trends in the global demand of more electric aircrafts with higher efficiency, high power density, and high degree of compactness has opened up numerous opportunities in front of avionics industries to develop innovative efficient and at the same time reliable power electronic interfaces. 3. Three different types of capacitors - film, aluminum electrolytic and ceramic have been undergone through their mutual trade-off comparison process in terms of energy density and failure rate – this leads to a theoretical understanding of the selection trade-offs to meet a set of converter performance metrics. 4. a unified design approach chosen to select the optimum combination of candidates for critical power stage components in terms of various performance metrics and thereby, assess the overall power density and reliability of RTRU. A unified design approach chosen to select the optimum combination of candidates for critical power stage components in terms of various performance metrics and thereby, assess the overall power density and reliability of RTRU This manuscript is organized as follows: section II introduces and defines different performance metrices for any general power electronic converter.
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