Design and Implementation of a Ground Power Unit Based on the Fault-Tolerant Inverter

Due to the widespread use of static power converters in various industries and sensitive applications such as ground power units (GPUs), it is essential that the inverters have high reliability. A failure in the inverters can cause undesirable consequences such as; low performance, shutting down the system, and losing the stability of the entire system. On the other hand, in some critical industrial processes with high standstill cost and safety-aspect concerns, such as aircrafts, high reliability, and survivability of the system are very important. Therefore, the use of fault-tolerant (FT) inverters is inevitable in such applications. In this paper, using an FT inverter, the reliability of the GPUs is increased and it results in higher availability and continuous system performance. Furthermore, a simple automatic fault-detection (FD) algorithm is presented by taking the inverter pole voltage as a fault detection parameter. The inverter is analyzed for open-circuit (OC) fault in the switches and the reliability of the FT inverter is compared with the classic inverter. The simulation and experimental results of the 1 kVA converter prototype are presented to confirm the FT inverter performance and the proposed method.