Comprehensive reliability evaluation of three types of connection of DC–DC converters: single‐phase, two‐phase, and parallel input‐series output

Abstract

Abstract With the increasing use of power electronic converters, the reliability studies of these converters are essential. The most important factor in increasing the reliability of power converters is their structures. In this paper the reliability evaluation of a DC–DC converter with various connections including single‐phase, interleaved, and parallel‐input and series‐output (PISO) topologies is presented. In the first view, it seems that the interleave topology has high reliability, but considering the more presented detailed indexes, it is identified that the PISO structure has a higher reliability than the interleave structure. In this paper for better evaluation, the various topologies are considered which operate at full rated power and half power. To calculate the reliability of the converters the important parameters such as the thermal and electrical stresses of elements are considered. The Markov model is used to evaluate the reliability. In order to verify the presented studies and analysis, the DC–DC converters with single‐phase, interleaved, and PISO have been implemented. The experimental results show that the PISO topology has higher reliability.

Keywords

• DC–DC power convertors
• reliability
• DC–DC converter
• IPOS
• reliability
• single‐phase