Due to the ongoing growth of Solar PV generation on the energy share, it is of major interest to achieve cost reductions for this technology. When considering PV plant lifetime and reliability, the power converter element is responsible for approximately 50% of total failures on a solar PV plant. Thus, this paper proposes a fault-tolerant multistring converter to address this challenge. This converter is able to survive a first fault achieving fault tolerance in both DC-DC and DC-AC stages. In order to validate this design, a 5 kW lab-scale prototype has been tested under emulated faults successfully. Also, a quantitative evaluation of the proposed fault-tolerant converter has concluded that by a total cost increase of only 4% and an efficiency reduction of a 0.5%, this topology almost doubles the converter lifetime expectancy in comparison to the conventional setup.
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