Abstract

Different functionalities can be incorporated into wind energy conversion systems (WECSs) in resilient microgrids in order to reduce the total system cost and to assist their self-healing capability. Meanwhile, wind industry-based reliability surveys have addressed that power electronics components are the most vulnerable parts in WECS. Therefore, thermal stresses and lifetime consumption of WECS are critical factors for evaluating the added functionalities and for developing new control strategies as well. Almost all of the previous methodologies in the literature tackle the problem of lifetime assessment of WECS using only the behavior of wind generation profiles and reactive power injection, which is limited by grid codes. Subsequently, these approaches cannot efficiently achieve lifetime assessment in case of resilient microgrid operation and different load demands. This paper proposes a more convenient approach for thermal behavior, and lifetime assessment for WECSs that considers the influence of the added DSTATCOM functionality, and various modes of resilient microgrids operation. Moreover, the proposed approach utilizes a joint probability distribution function (JPDF) that combines both of the collected field data of wind generation and load demand levels as well. The feasibility of the proposed approach has been verified analytically and compared to the previously addressed approaches. It can be concluded that thermal behavior and reliability assessment of WECS are highly impacted by the added DSTATCOM functionality.