Identification of an Incipient Snubber Failure in Inverter Employed in Solid Oxide Fuel Cell (SOFC) Fed Microgrid

Abstract

Production of electricity in a manner that is clean, efficient, and ecologically friendly is one of the primary challenges today. For producing clean electrical energy, solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs), are regarded as an intriguing technology. When it comes to microgrid (MG) applications, SOFCs are a great choice because of their efficiency, environmental advantages, fuel flexibility, and dependability. In MG inverters (MGIs), snubber circuits are essential for enhancing the power electronic system’s performance, efficiency, and dependability. The MGI is an extremely significant component of an integral grid-tied system. This article proposes a 3-phase inverter’s (3PHIs) incipient snubber circuit fault (ISCF) recognition approach for insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) inverters coupled to SOFCs employed in microgrid systems. Investigative work has been carried out on the inverter’s current output using discrete wavelet transform (DWT) to identify snubber defects. During the analysis, wavelet coefficients of the output current of the inverter are taken into account together with their kurtosis and skewness values. A comparative analysis has been conducted to find the optimum specific variables for the identification of ISCF in IGBT-based MGIs. For detecting ISCF, a defect detection algorithm has been developed. Furthermore, this investigation’s comparative evaluation and distinctive contribution have been evidenced.