Remaining Useful Life Estimation of Insulated Gate Biploar Transistors (IGBTs) Based on a Novel Volterra k-Nearest Neighbor Optimally Pruned Extreme Learning Machine (VKOPP) Model Using Degradation Data

Zhen Liu; Wenjuan Mei; Xianping Zeng; Chenglin Yang; Xiuyun Zhou

doi:10.3390/s17112524

Remaining Useful Life Estimation of Insulated Gate Biploar Transistors (IGBTs) Based on a Novel Volterra k-Nearest Neighbor Optimally Pruned Extreme Learning Machine (VKOPP) Model Using Degradation Data

Sensors (Basel). 2017 Nov 3;17(11):2524. doi: 10.3390/s17112524.

Authors

Zhen Liu¹, Wenjuan Mei², Xianping Zeng³, Chenglin Yang⁴, Xiuyun Zhou⁵

Affiliations

¹ School of Automation Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China. scdliu@uestc.edu.cn.
² School of Automation Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China. 2015070903035@std.uestc.edu.cn.
³ Quanzhou Institute of Equipment Manufacturing, Haixi Institutes, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Quanzhou 362200, China. 201321070144@std.uestc.edu.cn.
⁴ School of Automation Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China. yangclin@uestc.edu.cn.
⁵ School of Automation Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China. zhouxy@uestc.edu.cn.

Abstract

The insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) is a kind of excellent performance switching device used widely in power electronic systems. How to estimate the remaining useful life (RUL) of an IGBT to ensure the safety and reliability of the power electronics system is currently a challenging issue in the field of IGBT reliability. The aim of this paper is to develop a prognostic technique for estimating IGBTs' RUL. There is a need for an efficient prognostic algorithm that is able to support in-situ decision-making. In this paper, a novel prediction model with a complete structure based on optimally pruned extreme learning machine (OPELM) and Volterra series is proposed to track the IGBT's degradation trace and estimate its RUL; we refer to this model as Volterra k-nearest neighbor OPELM prediction (VKOPP) model. This model uses the minimum entropy rate method and Volterra series to reconstruct phase space for IGBTs' ageing samples, and a new weight update algorithm, which can effectively reduce the influence of the outliers and noises, is utilized to establish the VKOPP network; then a combination of the k-nearest neighbor method (KNN) and least squares estimation (LSE) method is used to calculate the output weights of OPELM and predict the RUL of the IGBT. The prognostic results show that the proposed approach can predict the RUL of IGBT modules with small error and achieve higher prediction precision and lower time cost than some classic prediction approaches.

Keywords: IGBT; VKOPP; degradation data; prediction model; remaining useful life.