Condition monitoring for DC-link capacitors based on artificial neural network algorithm

In power electronic systems, capacitor is one of the reliability critical components. Recently, the condition monitoring of capacitors to estimate their health status have been attracted by the academic research. Industry applications require more reliable power electronics products with preventive maintenances. However, the existing capacitor condition monitoring methods suffer from either increased hardware cost or low estimation accuracy, being the challenges to be adopted in industry applications. New development in condition monitoring technology with software solutions without extra hardware will reduce the cost, and therefore could be more promising for industry applications. A condition monitoring method based on Artificial Neural Network (ANN) algorithm is therefore proposed in this paper. The implementation of the ANN to the DC-link capacitor condition monitoring in a back-to-back converter is presented. The error analysis of the capacitance estimation is also given. The presented method enables a pure software based approach with high parameter estimation accuracy.