Online diagnostic method of open‐switch faults in PWM voltage source rectifier based on instantaneous AC current distortion.

The three‐phase pulse‐width modulating (PWM) voltage source rectifier (VSR) system is widely used because of its advantages in performance. Numerous studies show that power semiconductors are significant contributors to the overall failure rate of power converters. This study presents an online diagnosis method for a single open‐switch fault of a three‐phase PWM VSR, because existing research mainly focuses on fault diagnosis of inverters. The proposed method employs current distortion to diagnose faults in a convenient and simple way. It requires no extra hardware but only AC current signals, which are available in the control system and can be embedded into the existing driving software as a subroutine without excessive computational effort. The proposed method offers high diagnostic effectiveness and reliability. Experimental results show that the proposed method can diagnose the faulty switch at low currents as well as under abrupt load transient conditions without false alarms. Furthermore, the average diagnostic time of this method is only 1.8 ms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]