Reliability comparison of two industrial AC/DC converters with resonant and non-resonant topologies

One of the most significant parameters that the electronic designers are trying to increase, is the reliability or the effective lifetime of the circuit. For example the designers are always trying to achieve higher efficiency. One of the most important influence of the greater efficiency is the reduction of the thermal stress on the components, that leads to increase of the reliability. In this paper the reliability of two different industry-based structures as an AC/DC converter, have been compared. These circuits are from two different generations of power supplies in a particular industry, which the first introduced structure has greater efficiency due to soft switching. FIDES method has been utilized for the purpose of the comparison of the two converters reliability. First, the main characteristics of FIDES method will be introduced and compared with the other prevalent methods such as MIL-HDBK-217F-(2) and IEC-TR-62380. Eventually, reliability calculations based on FIDES will be utilized, in order to compare the introduced structures. Results have shown that the reliability of the resonant topology despite the greater number of the components is improved.