Comparative Evaluation of Lifetime of Three-Level Inverters in Grid-Connected Photovoltaic Systems

The cost of the PV energy reduction is still required to increase the penetration level of PV systems in the energy market. The reliability of PV inverters is one of the important aspects to be enhanced in order to reduce the cost of PV energy, since it is closely related to the maintenance cost and the annual energy production. In this paper, the lifetime of NPC and T-type inverters, which are three-level inverter topologies that are widely used for PV systems, are comparatively evaluated with a 30 kW grid-connected PV system. It is performed by focusing on power devices since the power electronic components of both converters are the same except for the power devices. Therefore, this result can represent the comparison of the reliability performance of the NPC and T-type inverters. The power loss and temperature distributions of power devices are analyzed and their efficiencies are compared at different power levels with different switching frequencies. The lifetimes of the reliability-critical power devices in the NPC and T-type inverters are estimated, respectively with a one-year mission profile of the PV system, and the results are compared.