Abstract
Reliability in the electrical drives is becoming an important issue in many applications. In this context, the reliability associated to the switched reluctance machine (SRM) is also an important area of research. One of the major problems, that strongly affect its operation, are drive power semiconductors faults. Typical power converter topologies used in SRM drives cannot handle faults in their power semiconductors. So, this paper presents a power converter topology that provides fault-tolerant capabilities to the drive under a switch fault. This power converter will be used considering that a change in the direction of the current that flows in the SRM windings does not affect the behavior of the machine. Besides that, the proposed power converter will allow to generate multilevel phase voltages in order to apply different voltage levels as function of the SRM speed. A laboratory power converter was developed to test the SRM drive in normal and faulty conditions. From the obtained results it was possible to verify the fault-tolerant capability of the drive under switch faults in different devices and failure modes. It was also possible to confirm the multilevel operation of the drive.
Highlights
The Switched Reluctance Machine (SRM) is a very wellknown electrical machine, but, when compared with other electrical machines, not so used in common applications
In order to present a comparison with the existing multilevel power converter, it is presented a study about the theoretical probability of failure expected from both converters (NPC-AHB and proposed topology, as presented in Fig.1 and Fig.2, respectively) after the failure in the IGBTs of one phase
In this paper, a new fault tolerant SRM drive with multilevel characteristics was proposed
Summary
The Switched Reluctance Machine (SRM) is a very wellknown electrical machine, but, when compared with other electrical machines, not so used in common applications. Other faulttolerant topology schemes based on the special design of the motors were proposed to mitigate or solve this problem [22], [23] Another aspect associated to the fault tolerant operation in power electronic converters is the fault detection of the power semiconductors [24]–[26]. In [45] it is described a novel fault-tolerant converter that takes the advantages of multilevel output converter in the normal operation mode and exploits the switching states that are destructive for the conventional NPC topology and use them for fault-tolerance purposes. Another issue that this work addresses is the problem related with the balance of the input capacitors In this way, it is presented a proposal to use the redundant states for the balance of those capacitors in normal and fault tolerant condition
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