Fault-tolerant operation of the cascaded H-bridge three-level inverter for electric vehicle application

Abstract

Electric Vehicle is the future of sustainable road transport. One of the important issues with electric vehicles is their inverter failure. This paper presents a fault-tolerant technique with phase fault detection and fault removal for a three-phase cascaded H-bridge three-level inverter. The phase fault-detection and fault-removal techniques are based on the switch voltage, switch current and switching signal detection. The cascaded H-bridge three-level inverter is made fault-tolerant by using an additional H-bridge and three bidirectional IGBT switches. The logic of phase fault detection and fault removal is investigated in the MATLAB-Simulink environment and validated in OPAL RT-LAB.

KEYWORDS:

• Cascaded H-bridge
• electric vehicle
• fault-tolerant operation
• phase fault-detection
• phasefault-removal
• three-level inverter

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).