Fault Diagnosis and Tolerant Control of Single IGBT Open-Circuit Failure in Modular Multilevel Converters

The modular multilevel converter (MMC) is distinguished by its modularity that is the use of standardized sub-modules (SMs). To enhance reliability and avoid unscheduled maintenance, it is desired that an MMC can remain operational without having to shut down despite some of its SMs are failed. Particularly, in this paper, complete fault diagnosis and tolerant control solution, including the fault detection, fault tolerance, fault localization, and fault reconfiguration, have been proposed to ride through the insulated gate bipolar transistor open-circuit failures. The fault detection method detects the fault by means of state observers and the knowledge of fault behaviors of MMC, without using any additional sensors. Then, the MMC is controlled in a newly proposed tolerant mode until the specific faulty SM is located by the fault localization method; thus, no overcurrent problems will happen during this time interval. After that, the located faulty SM will be bypassed while the remaining SMs are reconfigured to provide continuous operation. Throughout the fault periods, it allows the MMC to operate smoothly without obvious waveform distortion and power interruption. Finally, experimental results using a single-phase scaled-down MMC prototype with six SMs per arm show the validity and feasibility of the proposed methods.