Comparative reliability analysis of a three phase five level cascaded H-bridge and H-bridge with level doubling network inverter topologies

This paper presents a comparative reliability analysis of two three-phase modular inverter topologies, one of which was introduced recently. The objective of the work is to demonstrate the relative prospective reliabilities of compared power electronic architectures. The reliability of the multilevel inverters is analyzed at system level, firstly, by calculating failure rate for each component, in accordance with part-count method used in MIL-HDBK-217F and secondly, by examining the failure behavior of the converters under different fault modes simulated in Matlab/Simulink environment. The latter has revealed a potential reliability advantage of newer multilevel inverter structure, for a given number of levels to be generated and amount of energy to be converted.