Reliability modeling of capacitor bank for Modular Multilevel Converter based on Markov State-Space Model

Since capacitors are the main components which cause failure in medium voltage and high voltage power converters, it is very essential to study and assess the reliability of capacitors within a converter. In this paper, the reliability modeling of the capacitor bank for the Modular Multilevel Converters (MMC) based on Markov State-Space Model (MSSM) is carried out and then within a determined case study, reliability of the capacitor bank is evaluated by considering both Aluminum Electrolytic (ALE) Capacitor Bank (CB) and film CB designs. Furthermore, the comparison among the reliability modeling methods i.e. Part-Count, Combinatorial and Markov Model has been done and it is shown that the Markov Model result by considering the fault tolerance and redundancy for the capacitor bank are expected to be more accurate and it has more pragmatic results with respect to the other reliability models.