A Unified Open-Circuit-Fault Diagnosis Method for Three-Level Neutral-Point-Clamped Power Converters

Fast and accurate fault diagnosis is important to enhance the reliability of power converters. Since both open-circuit faults in insulated gate bipolar translator (IGBTs) and diodes deteriorate power quality, diagnosis methods only focusing on IGBT failures are easily disturbed by diode failures. In this work, we propose a unified effective residual-based open-circuit fault diagnosis method for all semiconductor devices including IGBTs, clamping diodes, and freewheeling diodes in three-level neutral-point-clamped power converters. The voltage and current residuals are calculated from the mismatches between the actual current path and the estimated one, requiring solely the already existing current measurement of the system. By analyzing the variation of the voltage and current residuals in all open-circuit failure cases, the proposed diagnosis method can locate the faulty switch within several sampling periods, i.e., less than 1 ms. Finally, the proposed diagnosis method is incorporated in the model predictive current control framework. Both experimental and hardware-in-the-loop results confirm the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed diagnosis method at various operation scenarios.