Power electronic systems are gradually gaining more attention in various industrial applications, such as renewable energy generation, electric vehicles, smart grids, and industrial motor drives. The industrial and energy sectors are also following the same trend, and a lot of efforts are being devoted to improving power electronic systems in order to account for reliability with cost-effective combined with sustainable solutions. A paradigm shift in reliability research and engineering in power electronics is going on in terms of the design methodologies, reliability testing concepts, and robustness validation approaches [1], [2] and Fig. 1 illustrates the important aspects of modern reliability engineering in power electronics, which need to be mastered for future products.
Research on active switching devices, passive components, and interconnections is of high interest in order to have a better understanding on the component-level reliability physics and this is naturally extended to system-level reliability based on component level reliability physics. Furthermore, with the consideration of reliability as performance, the existing or new power converter topologies and control schemes need to be studied in multi-physics domains to optimize their design. Further on fault-tolerant design and prognostic health management are also interesting research areas to provide additional opportunities to ensure the reliable field operation of power electronic systems, especially in reliability-critical applications. However, the more easy interconnection – eg. IoT will make such things commodity in almost all kind of products. At the same time emerging technologies like GaN and SiC devices call constantly for new life time models, new test methods to understand the devices fully as well as doing better integration in order to keep the pace and launch strong products to a power electronics market, which is booming for the moment as a part of making the society more sustainable.
The purpose of this Special Issue is to review the state-of-the-art in the Robust and Reliable Power Electronics fields and to disseminate the recent advancements in Reliability Engineering and how to approach it from device to systems. It is my believe this field is one of the very emerging topics in the next decade and it needs a very multidisciplinary efforts to achieve the goal.
This Special Issue on Robust and Reliable Power Electronics has collected 3 papers from basic reliability engineering to more system engineering in terms of control and operation.