On-line Condition Monitoring and Maintenance of Power Electronic Converters Shakeb A. Khan & Tariqul Islam & Neeraj Khera & A. K. Agarwala Received: 19 April 2014 /Accepted: 29 October 2014 /Published online: 9 November 2014 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014 Abstract This paper presents on-line technique for condition based maintenance of power electronic converters. The wear- out condition for high failure rate components is obtained based on parametric degradation. As per MIL Handbook 217 F, electrolytic capacitors and switching transistors togeth- er constitutes more than 90 % failures of power electronic systems. An electronic control gear circuit for fluorescent lamp is designed for on-line condition monitoring of target aluminum electrolytic capacitors and MOSFET at an accelerated aging condition. A low cost microcontroller board is programmed for data acquisition and test circuit control. Data values are serially communicated to National Instru- ments LabVIEW software, installed on the host computer for algorithm implementation and condition based mainte- nance of circuit. Using web publishing tool, the control of running state front panel VI is continuously transferred from local host to the client as an HTML file that is accessed in standard web browsers. Operator can remotely monitor the health of life limiting devices and can perform condition based shut down of the circuit. Also parametric data values of target devices are stored on hard disk of host computer in MS Excel file. Keywords Accelerated aging . Equivalent series resistance . On-state drain-source resistance . Wear-out condition . Web based condition monitoring 1 Introduction Reliability of electronic components is determined from their parametric degradation at end of life or wear-out condition. As per MIL Handbook 217 F, electrolytic capacitors and switching transistors have high failure rates compared to other electronic devices and they together constitute more than 90 % of failures of power electronic systems. In power electronic systems the aluminum-electrolytic capacitors are widely used in comparison to tantalum-electrolytic capacitors, as they have high energy density, high operating voltage ratings, high ripple current ratings and are available at low cost. Aluminum electrolytic capacitors are known to be critical devices at high temperatures above 100 °C [16], [11]. Power MOSFETs are the preferred switching transistor at high power density and high switching frequencies due to their low gate drive power, fast switching speed, low switching loss and superior paralleling capability. These life limiting components are se- lected based on their reliability and endurance data given in datasheet of manufacturer but the actual in circuit lifetime of these devices is much different than stated by manufacturer in their datasheet. Therefore, real time condition monitoring of these life limiting components is very important and is also a challenge. In this paper, parametric degradation at end of life or at wear-out condition is analyzed using accelerated aging for aluminum electrolytic capacitors and MOSFET in an electronic control gear (ECG) circuit for fluorescent lamp. The target aluminum capacitors form the low pass filter stage while a pair of MOSFETs is used as switching transistors at the voltage fed half bridge inverter stage of the ECG circuit. At the accelerated aging condition the real time condition of aluminum electrolytic capacitors is obtained in terms of its remaining useful life in number of hours using known life calculation algorithm [1] and [10], while the state of MOSFET is obtained based on parametric degradation [22] and [6]. A low cost microcontroller board is programmed as data Responsible Editor: V. Champac S. A. Khan (*) : T. Islam : N. Khera Department of Electrical Engineering Jamia Millia Islamia, Central University, Delhi 110025, India e-mail: skhan3@jmi.ac.in A. K. Agarwala Instrument Design Development Centre IIT, Delhi 110016, India J Electron Test (2014) 30:701–709 DOI 10.1007/s10836-014-5491-3