Iranian Journal of Electrical and Electronic Engineering

In this paper, a stochastic approach is proposed for reliability assessment of bidirectional DC-DC converters, including the fault-tolerant ones. This type of converters can be used in a smart DC grid, feeding DC loads such as home appliances and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs). The reliability of bidirectional DC-DC converters is of such an importance, due to the key role of the expected increasingly utilization of DC grids in modern Smart Grid. Markov processes are suggested for reliability modeling and consequently calculating the expected effective lifetime of bidirectional converters. A three-leg bidirectional interleaved converter using data of Toyota Prius 2012 hybrid electric vehicle is used as a case study. Besides, the influence of environment and ambient temperature on converter lifetime is studied. The impact of modeling the reliability of the converter and adding reliability constraints on the technical design procedure of the converter is also investigated. In order to investigate the effect of leg increase on the lifetime of the converter, single leg to five-leg interleave DC-DC converters are studied considering economical aspect and the results are extrapolated for six and seven-leg converters. The proposed method could be generalized so that the number of legs and input and output capacitors could be an arbitrary number.

In this paper a novel four-leg interleaved DC-DC boost converter is proposed which is well suitable for fuel cell vehicles (FCV) application. The voltage stress of two switches of this converter is half of the conventional interleaved converters. Therefore, smaller and cheaper switches can be utilized. Also "on" state duration of the two of four switches are reduced in comparison with conventional converter. Furthermore, comparing the losses of the proposed converter to conventional one – which is used in ،Toyota Mirai 2015 – shows a significant loss reduction in full power range. The proposed converter is simulated within an FCV in urban and highway driving cycles using ADVISOR software. The results show that the average power loss of the converter is improved about 32% in urban cycle and about 17% in highway cycle comparing to conventional one.