Condition monitoring of dc-link electrolytic capacitors in PWM power converters using OBL method

Abstract

Since the lifespan of an electrolytic capacitor is relatively short compared to other power semiconductor devices, the failure rate accounts for 60% and, thus, it is the most vulnerable component of the power conversion device. Therefore, the accurate measurement of the lifetime of an electrolytic capacitor is very important in ensuring the reliability of the entire system, including the capacitor. In this paper, an online failure detection method for a DC-link electrolytic capacitor in a back-to-back Pulse width Modulation (PWM) converter using the opposition-based learning particle swarm optimization-based Support Vector Regression (OPSO-SVR) technique is proposed. In this method, the capacitance and the DC-link capacitor power have been used in offline mode for SVR training and testing. During the offline mode, the SVR parameters have been optimized with the OPSO algorithm to use online to estimate the real value of the DC-link capacitor. The experimental results prove the superiority of the proposed technique over the SVR.