Fault-tolerant control for three-phase three-level T-type inverters with a redundant leg

Abstract

Three-level T-type inverters have lower total harmonic distortion in output voltage, higher power density and lower voltage stress of power switches compared with conventional two-level inverters and have been widely used in applications with a wide-power range. Reliability improvement is particularly important for the T-type inverters because of the increased number of power switches and high system complexity. This paper proposes a fault-tolerant topology, which is constructed by adding a redundant leg including halfbridge switches and neutral-point switches connected between the DC bus capacitors and the DC-link midpoint of the conventional T-type inverter. In addition, an after-fault control strategy is proposed based on the results of a fault diagnosis method using bridge voltage. The fault-tolerant control of the open-circuit fault of the power switches and the phase-leg fault can both be achieved by the proposed method. Experimental results are given to verify that the proposed fault-tolerant three-level T-type inverter can output the full voltage level and power during the fault-tolerant operation based on the proposed control strategy.

Keywords

• fault diagnosis
• fault-tolerant control
• open-circuit fault
• phase-leg fault
• redundant leg
• t-type inverter