A Simultaneous Diagnosis Method for Power Switch and Current Sensor Faults in Grid-Connected Three-Level NPC Inverters

A simultaneous diagnosis method for power switch open-circuit faults and current sensor faults of grid-connected three-level neutral point clamped (NPC) inverters is proposed herein. First, by designing the adaptive reaching law and reducing the steady-state resonance, a novel interval sliding model observer is developed to track and estimate the three-phase currents accurately and rapidly. Next, a faulty phase detection scheme using an adaptive threshold is proposed to achieve sensitive and robust detection results. Also, the measured three-phase currents sum and estimated three-phase currents sum are used to distinguish power switch open-circuit faults and current sensor faults. Subsequently, a faulty switch location method and the current sensor fault type identification method are proposed, using some of the same identification variables. Finally, combining the faulty phase detection variables with the identification methods ensures the feasibility of the detection and identification of 12 open-circuit faults and 9 current sensor faults. The hardware-in-the-loop test results are performed to validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.