Reliability evaluation of overall wind energy conversion system incorporating power electronic inverter

With the prevailing power crisis due to ongoing depletion of fossil fuels, renewable sources of energy have assumed an important area of research. Particularly due to the variable wind speed, the wind turbine‐based generation system incorporates AC‐DC‐AC conversion for synchronised operation with the grid system. Thus the converter plays a vital role in overall wind generator systems. Due to this reason the Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT)‐based inverters are increasingly being used in wind energy conversion systems. The significant contribution of this paper is that the reliability of converter system has been computed considering thermal stress, based on electrical and thermal modelling of three‐phase IGBT‐based inverter using Permanent Magnet Synchronous Generator (PMSG). The results contained in the paper corroborate the efficacy of the proposed methodology.