Interleaved Active Front-Ends Design Criteria for Reliability improvements

This paper describes the advantages that can be obtained in ac/dc conversion, when an innovative four-quadrant converter, named synchronous active front-end (SAFE), is employed. The modular system, which increases the availability of the power delivering, can also be designed in order to obtain an improvement of the mission reliability. The reliability of single-AFE topology and the one of a SAFE are here compared. Based on the classical reliability prediction method, this contribution gives a design criteria of the optimum number of the parallel-connected converters and of their switching frequency, in order to match the reliability constrains.