Reliability and cost analysis of different Power inverter topologies in Electric Vehicles

Reliability of Power inverter in an Electric Vehicle is of great importance as it is one of the most critical components of the electric powertrain. The failure rate prediction model (parts count method) is utilized to calculate reliability of Power inverter topologies. It is found that paralleling the switching devices increases the reliability of the Power inverter but the reliability saturates eventually. This paper presents a technique for selecting the number of switching devices that can be paralleled in a Power inverter optimizing both the reliability and the cost. 60 kW electric Powertrain is taken as an example.