Transient Phenomena and Failures Analysis in Redundant Power Converters

In last decades a remarkable progress has been reached in the development of power electronic technologies. This achievement has been driven by major factors such as the successive apparition of high reliability gate-controlled power devices or improving cost-effectiveness of electronic commutation. In spite of all these achievements faults remains unavoidable in power electronic converters and their faulttolerance represents a major design issue for researchers and developers. This paper presents a specially designed power converter topology that uses hardware redundancy strategy in order to achieve its high safety and fault-free operation. For this purpose an original mathematical model has been developed that is full suitable to model a wide range of faulty states in power converter modules. The proposed model has been validated through detailed computer simulations. The designed hardware redundant power converter architecture embeds two stand alone inverter modules interconnected into a parallel operation and switching topology. During the laboratory experiments this configuration has proved a high degree of reliability and faultfree operation. In order to evidence the complex switching events and occurred transient states a set of real-time waveform plots have been captured. Thorough analyses confirm that the proposed redundant converter topology is well suited for utilization in a wide range of applications that require high safety and reliable operation. Such solutions are specially recommended in critical industrial application where damages or material losses are impermissible at all.