Wear-Out Failure Analysis of an Impedance-Source PV Microinverter Based on System-Level Electrothermal Modeling

Abstract

In this paper, the wear-out performance of an impedance-source photovoltaic (PV) microinverter (MI) is evaluated and improved based on two different mission profiles. The operating principle and hardware implementation of the MI are first described. With the experimental measurements on a 300-W MI prototype and system-level finite-element method simulations, the electrothermal models are built for the most reliability-critical components, i.e., power semiconductor devices and capacitors. The dependence of the power loss on the junction/hotspot temperature is considered, the enclosure temperature is taken into account, and the thermal cross-coupling effect between components is modeled. Then, the long-term junction/hotspot temperature profiles are derived and further translated into components’ annual damages with the lifetime and damage accumulation models. After that, the Monte Carlo simulation and Weibull analysis are conducted to obtain the system wear-out failure probability over time. It reveals that both the mission profile and the thermal cross-coupling effect have a significant impact on the prediction of system wear-out failure, and the dc-link electrolytic capacitor is the bottleneck of long-term reliability. Finally, the multimode control with a variable dc-link voltage is proposed, and a more reliable dc-link electrolytic capacitor is employed, which results in a remarkable reliability improvement for the studied PV MI.