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US company Infinrel says its Energy Kardio Graph solution can sample small electrical disturbances at the inverter input and output at MHz scale and provide insight into the actual operation of the inverter based on its switching cycle.
US company Infinrel has developed a new software solution that actively predicts component failure in inverters used in large-scale photovoltaic plants.
“Our Energy Kardio Graph (EKG) system works like a medical electrocardiogram, but 10,000 times faster,” founder and CEO Bert Wank told pv magazine . “It samples tiny electrical disturbances at the inverter input and output on a MHz scale, millions of times per second, and provides insight into the actual operation of the inverter based on its switching cycle.”
The new solution can reportedly expose artifacts from degraded components, such as saturated inductors or capacitors losing essential energy-damping ability, or high frequencies that can damage step-up transformers.
“Examining these figurative ‘heartbeats’ of the inverter allows infiniRel’s proprietary software to establish causality between the shape of the electrical signal, its cause and its effect,” adds Marco Marazzi, Vice President of Software Engineering at infiniRel. “Essentially, using a Failure Method and Effect Analysis process, our electrocardiogram will extract wavelet characteristics that relate to component degradation and eventual risk of failure.”
The software uses machine learning algorithms to process the data into features that label each functional group of components within the inverter, reducing the amount of high-causality data from MB/sec to kB/sec. “The EKG system is independent of any data source, as it creates high-resolution data on its own,” Wank says. “It keeps pace with the rate at which semiconductors experience changes in both voltages and currents, at a microsecond level, reporting not every second, but a million times per second.”
The company explained that a grid inverter powered by an insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) switches between 1 kHz and 3 kHz, requiring the gate drive to contain signals up to 1 MHz to optimize design efficiency. Newer inverters, which use gallium arsenide (GaN) or silicon carbide (SiC) power cells, switch between 20 kHz and 30 kHz, an order of magnitude faster than their fundamental switching frequency, which is the heartbeat of the power conversion system.
“If any of those drive signals deviate even slightly, internal power dissipation increases dramatically, causing the stack to fail,” Wank explains. “The software control loop, geared to meet utility 60 Hz power quality requirements and regulating based on switching cycles, doesn’t have the bandwidth to observe and respond to such subtle changes.”
Based in San Jose, California, Infinirel is raising capital to manufacture more EKGs and deploy them with its customers in the energy transition.
“We will be showcasing our solution at RE+ in Anaheim this week,” said Marazzi. “Infinirel was one of 10 winning teams from The Set! Contest that will move on to the final phase of the third round of the American-Made Solar Prize.” The U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) developed the contest to incentivize domestic solar entrepreneurs. Infinirel and each of the other 9 finalists will receive $100,000 in cash and $75,000 in vouchers at DOE national laboratories or other qualified partner facilities to further develop their technology. |
