Power Electronics Building Block (PEBB) hardware design and reliability prediction

Power Electronics Building Block (PEBB) concept has been proposed to simplify the conventional design process and reduce engineering efforts. The main idea of PEBB is to standardize the hardware and software design. A PEBB hardware is a power processor which integrates different groups of hardware components such as power semiconductors, sensing measurements and communication interface elements. Different range of power converters can be constructed easily by connecting a number of identical PEBBs in series and/or parallel. However, failure of a PEBB will degrade the reliability level of these converters. To prevent system breakdown, the life span of a PEBB hardware must be estimated so that maintenance works can be planned ahead. Therefore, this paper demonstrates part stress analysis to estimate a useful-life-cycle (Mean Time To Failure) of a well-developed PEBB hardware prototype. This PEBB has been used to construct a small-scaled modular multilevel converter for laboratory testing. Full reliability block diagram analysis and simplification techniques are enclosed.