Increasing the reliability of wind turbines using condition monitoring of semiconductor devices: a review

The majority of electrical failures of wind turbines occur in the semiconductor devices of both grid and generator converters. This is due to the temperature swings caused by the variability of wind speed, which causes the progressive degradation of semiconductor devices. In order to increase reliability and decrease the operating costs, several condition monitoring methods have been proposed in the technical literature for the semiconductor devices used in WT converters. This paper comparatively reviews these methods and tries to give directions on the future steps that should be addressed by the research on this area.