Dr.

Faisal Khan
Electrical & Computer Engineering University of Utah October 15 WEB 1250 3:05 p.m.

State of Health and Remaining Life Estimation of Power Conversion Systems Using Spread Spectrum Time Domain Reflectometry (SSTDR)
ABSTRACT:
A modern power conversion system may have components including high-power dc-ac inverters, electric machines such as motors and transformers, renewable energy sources such as wind generators or solar cells and energy storage units in the form of battery banks. Most of these power processing units are subjected to electrical and thermal stress resulting in performance degradation. The amount of degradation depends on several associated factors such as any overload, ambient temperature, switching impulses, loading variation and so on. In order to ensure a failure free operation, components in a power system employed in critical applications are being operated with redundancy and are needed to go through periodic replacements. This periodic maintenance is time and cost intensive, thus shows promise for optimization. Therefore, the effectiveness and utilization factor of these components in a converter such as in a motor drive system could be greatly enhanced if the power converters state of health could be identified with certain accuracy. This project aims to propose a new reflectometry based technique to identify the state of health of various components in a power system. So far there is no known single technique that can be universally applied to various components so that the overall systems reliability or remaining life could be predicted. According to the recent progress of this project, the proposed technique could be used to predict the remaining life of power converters and high-power transformers. This technique is applicable while power converter or the transformer is operational, and the accurate time to replace these aged components cannot be calculated using conventional prediction models. The proposed concept can detect impedance discontinuity in time and space, and using this feature, it is possible to detect the degradation in 1) windings in electric motors, 2) windings in power transformers, 3) power converters, 4) solar cells, 5) battery bank with a high number of cells connected in series and parallel. Because the technique provides time and space information, it is possible to detect the presence and location of a faulty/aged cell in a large solar panel, a degraded cell in a battery pack, any current leakage between adjacent winding inside a transformer/motor, and the overall performance degradation of a power converter. Therefore, this proposed technique has endless possibilities, can revolutionize the existing failure prediction models and improve the performance by several orders of magnitude. Biography of Faisal Khan Prof. Faisal Khan received his BSc, MS and PhD degrees from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, Arizona State University, and University of Tennessee in 1999, 2003 and 2007 respectively all in electrical engineering. From 2007-2009, Dr. Khan has been with Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) as a senior power electronics engineer. Since 2009, he is with the electrical and computer engineering department of University of Utah as an Assistant Professor. Prof. Khan is the founder of the Power Engineering and Automation Research Lab (PEARL) of University of Utah. Under his supervision, PEARL has proposed a new technique to estimate the remaining life of a live power converter without interrupting the normal operation. In addition, the AC solar cells design proposed by his group is which is presently under fabrication. Prof. Khan is a member of the IEEE power electronics society, industry applications society and industrial electronics society. He is the general chair of the upcoming IEEE COMPEL 2013 conference in Salt Lake City.

The public is invited