Abstract
Conference Title: 2017 IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting (PESGM) Conference Start Date: 2017, July 16 Conference End Date: 2017, July 20 Conference Location: Chicago, IL, USA The reliability of Modular Multilevel Converters (MMC) is a significant issue as a large number of semiconductor devices are equipped with each converter. Failure of one switching device in the converter may lead to shut-down of the entire system The fault-tolerant design approach can dominate faults and improve the system safety and reliability. In this paper, the reliability analysis is performed to compare the reliability performance of the half-bridge (HB) and the high-frequency isolation (HFI) based MMC converters. The N+1 redundancy designs are presented and assessed using Markov reliability model. A comparative evaluation of the HB-MMC and HFI-MMC topologies shows that the reliability of HB-MMC converter is much higher than that of the HFI-MMC converter.