Abstract
Inverters are considered the basic building blocks of industrial electrical drive systems that are widely used for various applications; however, the failure of electronic switches mainly affects the constancy of these inverters. For safe and reliable operation of an electrical drive system, faults in power electronic switches must be detected by an efficient system that is capable of identifying the type of faults. In this paper, an open switch fault identification technique for a three-phase inverter is presented. Single, double, and triple switching faults can be diagnosed using this method. The detection mechanism is based on stator current analysis. Discrete wavelet transform (DWT) using Daubechies is performed on the Clarke transformed (-) stator current and features are extracted from the wavelets. An artificial neural network is then used for the detection and identification of faults. To prove the feasibility of this method, a Simulink model of the DWT-based feature extraction scheme using a neural network for the proposed fault detection system in a three-phase inverter with an induction motor is briefly discussed with simulation results. The simulation results show that the designed system can detect faults quite efficiently, with the ability to differentiate between single and multiple switching faults.