A new approach for on-line open-circuit fault diagnosis of inverters based on current trajectory

Security and reliability of inverter are an indispensable part in power electronic system. Faults of inverter are usually caused by switch elements’ operating fault. Taking the inverter with hysteresis current control as the research object, a universal open-circuit fault location method which can be applied to multiple control strategies is proposed in the paper. If the switch open-circuit fault happens in inverter, the output phase current will inevitably change, which can be used as a characteristic for diagnosis, combined with the comparison of phase-current direction before and after the fault occurrence, to diagnose and locate the open-circuit fault in a half cycle. Moreover, this method requires neither system control signals nor sensor. The validity, reliability and limitation of the fault location method in the paper are verified and analyzed through dSPACE-based experiment platform.