Open Circuit Fault Diagnosis for Multi-Level Inverters Using An Improved Current Distortion Method

In power electronics field, power converters are the most common appliances that are used in enormous applications, such as renewable energy and electric motor drives. However, such appliances are opposed to fault at any time. Meanwhile, open circuit faults are the most common faults. In these regards, this paper presents a creative method to detect and identify the fault location based on the current distortion. The proposed method calculates the current distortion as well as the voltage variation besides creating an improved look-up table for Hybrid active neutral point inverters (HANPC). In addition, deep description of the proposed method and performance analysis of the operational behavior of the system are carried out. In addition, the effeteness of the proposed method is verified by simulation.