Survey of Fault-Tolerance Techniques for Three-Phase Voltage Source Inverters

Abstract

Inverters play key roles in motor drives, flexible power transmissions, and recently grid-tied renewable energy generation units. Therefore, availability and reliability of inverters have become increasingly important. Following early stage fault detections in inverters, remedial actions can extend normal operation of inverters and, in some cases, derate the system to prevent unexpected shutdowns. A remedial action typically contains a combination of hardware and software reconfigurations. The main purpose of this paper is to provide an instructive survey of existing fault-tolerance (remedial) techniques for three-phase, two-level, and multilevel inverters.