Journal of Power Electronics

The Korean Institute of Power Electronics (전력전자학회)
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Fault detection and tolerant control for flying-capacitor modular multilevel converters feeding induction motor drives

  • Received : 2022.01.04
  • Accepted : 2022.03.29
  • Published : 2022.06.20
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Abstract

In this paper, an IGBT open-circuit fault detection and fault-tolerant control strategy are proposed for a flying-capacitor modular multilevel converter (FC-MMC) feeding induction motor drives. Fault occurrence is detected by monitoring the sum of measured AC-circulating currents. In the fault case, the phase with the faulty device is identified through the errors between the measured and estimated output currents of the converter. In this phase, then, a localization of a faulty submodule (SM) is performed by investigating the SM capacitor voltages. Thereafter, the fault-tolerant control method is applied to reconfigure the converter structure, where the faulty SM is isolated and the converter can operate as normal. In addition, an SM capacitor voltage-balancing control scheme is proposed, where the number of current sensors is reduced to six from nine. Therefore, the system cost is lowered, and the communication burden is lightened. The viability of the proposed control scheme is confirmed by experimental results for an FC-MMC-fed induction motor drive system.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (No. 2021R1A2C2005996).

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