RELIABILITY STUDY OF COMMUNICATIONS TOPOLOGIES TO SUPPORT HIGH SUBMODULE COUNT CONVERTERS

With the increased adoption of large-scale distributed energy resources in power networks and multi-megawatt electrical drives in transportation systems, there is a growing need for high-power converters comprising high numbers of sub-rated converter modules. As module counts increase, the complexity and scale of the control and communications systems supporting the converters also increases, posing a challenge in terms of maintaining reliability of these systems. This paper presents a technique to calculate the reliability of inductrial communications systems supporting high-module-count converters. The technique leverages symmetry in the communications networks to minimize computational requirements. The estimated reliabilities from smaller network configurations show repeated patterns that may allow the prediction of a reliability figure of a larger network of the same configuration type. This will alleviate the need to undertake computationally intensive calculations to derive a figure.