Reliability of photovoltaic systems using seasonal mission profiles and the FIDES methodology

Article history: Received 26 June 2015 Received in revised form 23 November 2015 Accepted 30 November 2015 Available online 7 December 2015 In areas with hot weather, photovoltaic systems can be used to help relieve the peak demand caused by air conditioning equipment. Users, however, are reluctant to invest in solar technology, arguing that the equipment commercially available is unreliable because itwas developed for others environments. In this paper, the reliability assessment of a DC/DC converter aimed at PV applications is presented. The reliability estimation was performed following the FIDES methodology, taking into account seasonal mission profiles developed for five specific sites forwhich there ismeteorological data available. The goalwas to identify themost failure prone components, and the dominant stress factors. It was found that the smallest contribution to the failure rate occurs during winter. The largest contribution occurs in spring or summer, depending on the site. In the converter, themost failure-prone componentswere the diodes, which contributedwith about 70% of the overall failure rate. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.