An Intelligent Fault Diagnosis Method for Open-Circuit Faults in Power-Electronics Energy Conversion System

Applying the fault diagnosis techniques to power electronic equipments is beneficial to improve the stability and reliability of renewable energy system, because power electronic equipments are a key component of renewable energy system that largely defines their performance. This paper presents a novel intelligent fault diagnosis method for a three-phase power-electronics energy conversion system based on knowledge-based and data-driven methods. Firstly, the three-phase AC currents of the power-electronics energy conversion system are collected and used to analyze. Secondly, the feature transformation, a knowledge-based method, is utilized to preprocess the fault data. After feature transformation, the slopes of current trajectories (transformed features) are not affected by different loads. And then random forests algorithms (RFs), a data-driven method, are adopted to train the fault diagnosis classifier with the processed fault data. Finally, the proposed method is implemented online on an actual three-phase PWM rectifier platform. The results show that the proposed fault diagnosis method can successfully detect and locate the open-circuit faults in IGBTs of the three-phase PWM rectifier. In addition, the proposed method is suitable for most of three-phase power-electronics energy conversion systems.