Abstract
When targeting mission critical applications, the design of the electronic actuation systems needs to consider many requirements and constraints not typical in standard industrial applications. One of these is tolerance to faults, as the unplanned shutdown of a critical subsystem, if not handled correctly, could lead to financial harm, environmental disaster, or even loss of life. One way this can be avoided is through the design of an electric drive systems based on multi-phase machines that can keep operating, albeit with degraded performance, in a partial configuration under fault conditions. Distributed architectures are uniquely suited to meet these challenges, by providing a large degree of isolation between the various components. This paper presents a system architecture suitable for scalable and high-performance fault tolerant machine drive systems. the effectiveness of this system is demonstrated through theoretical analysis and experimental verification on a six-phase machine.
Highlights
T HE great flexibility of electric machines and drives when it comes to fine control has pushed the adoption of electrical actuation in many applications
To measure the latency associated with the designed communication protocol a simple counter is started by the packet generator as a new transmission is requested, and stopped when the receiver makes the data available to downstream logic
It should be noted that due to the short cabling run typical of power electronics application these latencies are dominated by the transmission time, which is limited by the channel bandwidth, as opposed to the signal phase or group delay
Summary
T HE great flexibility of electric machines and drives when it comes to fine control has pushed the adoption of electrical actuation in many applications. One of the aspects where electrical machines and power electronics have historically lagged other technologies is in high reliability and fault tolerance systems When it comes to mission critical applications, the use of fault tolerant system designs and topologies may be necessary, in order to prevent single faults from causing serious accidents, serious consequences, like environmental disasters, large financial damages or even loss of lives. A common trait between all these architectures, is their extensible construction, where a base unit is repeated multiple times in order to obtain the desired degree of fault isolation This suggests the suitability of these topologies in very highpower applications, where modular constructions are needed to deal with the large currents and voltages.
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