Reliability in Medium Voltage Converters for Wind Turbines

In order to meet the demands of turbine integration into the wind park grids, advanced power converter technologies have successfully been developed by ABB. Along with the ongoing move from onshore to offshore wind installations, the system reliability, maintenance costs and product quality have come into focus to a far greater extent. Even the smallest service for offshore installations immediately results in very high costs. At the same time the loss of energy production due to servicing is a significant loss of profit, especially for the large wind parks, where failures can also affect the operation of other generators. Therefore, strong effort must be taken to achieve high reliability in the power electronics converter system of the wind turbine. In this paper, an approach to design of ABB multimegawatt MV wind power converter PCS 6000 for reliability is discussed.