Reliability-cost models for the power switching devices of wind power converters

In order to satisfy the growing reliability requirements for the wind power converters with more cost-effective solution, the target of this paper is to establish a new reliability-cost model which can connect the relationship between reliability performances and corresponding semiconductor cost for power switching devices. First the conduction loss, switching loss as well as thermal impedance models of power switching devices (IGBT module) are related to the semiconductor chip number information respectively. Afterwards simplified analytical solutions, which can directly extract the junction temperature mean value T_m and fluctuation amplitude ΔT_j of power devices, are presented. With the proposed reliability-cost model, it is possible to enable future reliability-oriented design of the power switching devices for wind power converters, and also an evaluation benchmark for different wind power converter configurations is opened.