Remaining Useful Life Prediction of an IGBT Module in Electric Vehicles Statistical Analysis

Abstract

The whole life cycle of an insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) is a kind of asymmetry process, while the whole life cycles of a set of IGBTs can be regarded as a symmetry process. Modelling these symmetry characteristics of the IGBT life cycles enables the improvement of the remaining useful life (RUL) prediction performance. For this purpose, based on the key failure mechanism of IGBT in electric vehicles, a new method for estimating the RUL of an IGBT module is proposed based on the two-stress acceleration synthesis environment of junction temperature and vibration. The maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) was employed to estimate the logarithmic standard deviation and covariance matrix. The Shapiro–Wilk (S–W) test was performed to investigate the satisfaction degree of the RUL of the IGBT module to the lognormal distribution. The accelerated life test datasets of the IGBT module were analyzed using the Weibull++ software. The analysis results demonstrate that the IGBT lifetime is confirmed to lognormal distribution, and the accelerated model accords with the generalized Eyring acceleration model. The proposed method can estimate IGBT RUL in a short time, which provides a certain technical reference for the reliability analysis of the IGBT module.