A Reliability Evaluation of Marine Power Electronic Devices Based on Performance Degradation Data and a Competitive Failure Model

This paper proposes a reliability evaluation method for marine power electronic (MPE) devices that considers the characteristics of high reliability, long life, and multi-failure-mode competition. Performance degradation data are used to construct performance degradation and lifetime distribution models of MPE devices, and methods of parameter estimation, goodness-of-fit testing, and optimization are proposed to solve them. By considering the coupled competitive relationships of multiple performance parameters, a competitive failure model is proposed to rapidly evaluate the reliability of MPE devices. The Copula function and Monte Carlo method are used to solve the model. As an example, reliability evaluation is carried out for a marine insulated-gate bipolar transistor. The error between the evaluation result of the proposed method and an actual statistical case is demonstrated to be small, which verifies that the proposed method is accurate and effective.