Experimental Investigation of Inverter Open-Circuit Fault Diagnosis for Biharmonic Five-Phase Permanent Magnet Drive

Abstract

This paper proposes a procedure that is suitable for experimental investigation of real-time open-switch and open-phase faults diagnosis of a five-leg voltage source inverter feeding a five-phase biharmonic permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM). The algorithm is based on the specific characteristics of multiphase machines, which allows inverter fault detection with sufficient robustness of the algorithm in the presence of fundamental and third harmonic components. First, the inverter fault effects analysis is achieved in the characteristic subspaces of the five-phase PMSM. Specificities that are interesting for the elaboration of a real-time fault detection and identification (FDI) process are highlighted. Original and particular algorithms are used for an accurate 2-D normalized fault vector extraction in a defined fault reference frame. This frame is dedicated only for FDI. To ensure the high immunity of the FDI process against transient states, a particular normalization procedure is applied. The normalized diagnostic signals are formulated from the defined frame and other variables derived from the reference and measured currents. Simulation and experimental results of open-switch and open-phase faults are provided to validate the proposed algorithm.