High-efficiency fault-tolerant three-level SiC active NPC converter for safety-critical renewable energy applications

Ramin Katebi, Jiangbiao He, Timothy A. Bobeck, Waqar A. Khan, Nathan Weise

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

Fault tolerance plays a critical role for power electronic systems in safety-critical applications such as the distributed generation of renewable energy. Particularly, multi-level power converters have been intensively utilized in medium-voltage or high-voltage distributed generations, the circuit topologies of which contain many more switching devices, leading to increased device failure probability. However, one main drawback with the majority of the existing fault-tolerant power converter topologies is the degraded efficiency due to the addition of the redundant phase leg or power semiconductor modules. A new 3-phase 4-leg fault-tolerant active neutral point clamped (ANPC) converter is proposed to tolerate switching faults under faulty condition, which also provides high efficiency under normal healthy condition by leveraging the redundant leg for current sharing with other main phase legs. In this paper, the efficiency of this fault-tolerant ANPC inverter will be investigated under the proposed switching schemes with the current sharing capability. The experimental results verify that this new 3-phase 4-leg fault-tolerant ANPC converter achieves higher efficiency under the current sharing switching scheme than that without current sharing, under normal/healthy operating condition.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationPEDG 2019 - 2019 IEEE 10th International Symposium on Power Electronics for Distributed Generation Systems
Pages665-669
Number of pages5
ISBN (Electronic)9781728124551
DOIs
StatePublished - Jun 2019
Event10th IEEE International Symposium on Power Electronics for Distributed Generation Systems, PEDG 2019 - Xi'an, China
Duration: Jun 3 2019Jun 6 2019

Publication series

NamePEDG 2019 - 2019 IEEE 10th International Symposium on Power Electronics for Distributed Generation Systems

Conference

Conference10th IEEE International Symposium on Power Electronics for Distributed Generation Systems, PEDG 2019
Country/TerritoryChina
CityXi'an
Period6/3/196/6/19

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 IEEE.

Keywords

  • Active neutral point clamped converter
  • Fault tolerant operation
  • High efficiency
  • Silicon carbide

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Energy Engineering and Power Technology
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Control and Optimization

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