A Hybrid Multilevel Power Electronic Inverter and Fault Location Identification of Switching Devices

Abstract

Multilevel power inverter has brought tremendous revolution in high-power medium voltage industrial drive applications due to their superior performance compared to conventional inverters. This paper proposes a hybrid multilevel power electronic inverter (HMPEI) which comprises only one DC source and less number of clamping diodes. Simulation analyses are conducted using MATLAB software to investigate the robustness of the inverter. On the other hand, number of faults are frequently occurring in the inverter leading to adverse impacts on the reliability of the inverter and increasing the system maintenance and operational cost. Condition monitoring plays a vital role to ensure the reliability of the power electronic inverters through detecting incipient faults and rectify them before progression. There are a number of condition monitoring and fault diagnosis techniques to ensure the reliability of the inverter. Electrical signal based condition monitoring is one of the dominating techniques that is widely used to monitor the condition of power electronic inverters because it is easy to implement, cost effective, non-intrusive, able to detect early stage faults, fault location and mode. In this paper, electrical signals are employed to monitor and identify the fault locations in the proposed HMPEI.