A Quantitative Availability Analysis of Industrial DC Microgrids

Direct Current (DC) microgrids have gained significant interest over the past years. Especially in industry where, the benefits are plentiful. Benefits such as efficiency gains, CAPEX reduction, but most definitely also resilience against Alternating Current (AC) side disturbances and power quality issues. This paper presents a method using a semi-Markov model to quantitatively compare the instantaneous and steady state availability of an industrial DC distribution to a conventional industrial AC distribution. Three different scenarios are presented for which either the instantaneous or the steady state availability is determined. As expected, the DC microgrid proves to be more available than the conventional AC distribution. This paper demonstrates an increase of over an order of magnitude, while also considering converter failure.