Minimising capacitor lifetime failures in power converters for wave energy applications

The offshore location of wave energy converters demands a highly reliable and fault-tolerant system. Capacitors account for the majority of failures in power converters and should be replaced prior to failure to reduce system downtime. This paper presents a control methodology to reduce the rate of capacitor degradation as a means to improve fault tolerance. Modeling, simulation, and power converter control are systematically investigated using MATLAB/Simulink.