Comparison of reliability and economic feasibility for the three configurations of multiple battery charging systems

Abstract

Abstract Multiple battery charging systems can be configured with various combinations of ac‐dc and dc‐dc converters. This paper reviews the reliability and economy of three representative configurations of multi‐battery charging systems. Existing PSA (part stress analysis) can analyse the failure rate considering the environmental factors for the type of parts, the number of parts, the connection state of parts and the voltage and current stress of parts. However, since it does not reflect the system's operating characteristics, the Fault‐tree analysis (FTA) method based on the fault tree is used. Still, it cannot be analysed considering the operational risk of the converter according to various load conditions. Therefore, in this study, by defining a failure according to the minimum and maximum load of the multiple battery charging systems and designing a separate fault tree, the converter operation characteristics were considered by reflecting the number of battery charges, the characteristics according to SOC (state of charge) and the redundancy effect that appears when cyclic charging is applied. Through the new enhanced FTA method, the multiple battery charging systems (Type 1) to which sequential charging is applied are quantitatively proven advantageous in terms of reliability and economy.

Keywords

• battery chargers
• cost‐benefit analysis
• failure analysis
• power electronics
• reliability