A Mission Profile based Stress Emulation Method for Capacitors in High-power Converter Systems

This paper presents a dynamic operation profile emulation method for capacitors used in high-power converters. It preserves the advantages of a recently reported method with a minimum required power supply and is robust to testing sample degradation. This method is suitable for application-oriented stress emulation testing with different types of DC / AC capacitors and multi-condition operation in high power converter systems, such as wind power and railway systems. The circuit architecture and testing ability of this method are presented. Taking the mission profile of the AC capacitors in a railway traction system as an example, proof-of-concept experimental results are presented to verify the feasibility of the proposed test method.

I. Introduction

Capacitor is one of the highest failure rate components in power electronic systems [1]. The realistic stress emulation testing is a significant part of the performance characterization and reliability analysis of capacitors, which can help build reliable capacitor parametric models and optimize design margins [2]. Application-oriented stresses emulation based mission profiles for capacitor testing in power converter applications is of great interest.