FPGA-based Degradation Evaluation for Traction Power Module with Deep Recurrent Autoencoder

The timely and quantitative evaluation of the degradation is crucial for traction inverter systems in railway applications. The implementation in the industry is impeded by two major challenges including the varying operational profiles and the scalability for system-level applications. This paper proposes a deep recurrent autoencoder-based degradation evaluation method, to assess the degradation level of the traction power module online. The recurrent structure is embedded for processing multivariate time series condition monitoring data stream, in order to exploit the inherent time dependence to improve the accuracy and robustness. The autoencoder-based framework enables the scalability of the proposed method to system-level applications and can be applied under varying operating conditions. The method is experimentally demonstrated on an FPGA-based hardware platform.