Self-Healing Control with Multifunctional Gate Drive Circuits for Power Converters

Many commercial and military transport systems have fault diagnostic functions implemented to help protect the device when a severe fault occurs. However, most present systems do not contain prognostics capability which would allow operators to observe an unhealthy system component in its pre- fault condition. In industry applications, scheduled downtime can result in considerable cost avoidance. The next technology step is self-healing system components which observe not only potential problems, but can also take steps to continue operation under abnormal conditions - whether due to long-term normal wear-and-tear or sudden combat damage. In this paper, current and voltage information using the double-layer gate drive concept is fed to intelligent networks to identify the type of fault and its location. These intelligent networks are based on unsupervised and supervised learning networks (self-organizing maps and learning vector quantization networks respectively). The proposed concept allows the reconfiguration of the electric machinery system for continued normal operation of the machine. This paper presents an intelligent health monitoring and self-healing control strategy for a multi-phase multilevel motor drive under various types of faults.