Survey of Fault-Tolerance Techniques for Three-Phase Voltage Source Inverters

TLDR

Inverters are essential for motor drives, flexible power transmission, and grid‑tied renewable energy, making their availability and reliability increasingly critical, with early fault detection and combined hardware‑software reconfigurations extending operation. The paper aims to provide an instructive survey of existing fault‑tolerance (remedial) techniques for three‑phase, two‑level, and multilevel inverters. The authors survey and analyze the fault‑tolerance methods applied to these inverter topologies.

Abstract

Inverters play key roles in motor drives, flexible power transmissions, and recently grid-tied renewable energy generation units. Therefore, availability and reliability of inverters have become increasingly important. Following early stage fault detections in inverters, remedial actions can extend normal operation of inverters and, in some cases, derate the system to prevent unexpected shutdowns. A remedial action typically contains a combination of hardware and software reconfigurations. The main purpose of this paper is to provide an instructive survey of existing fault-tolerance (remedial) techniques for three-phase, two-level, and multilevel inverters.