Experimental validation of a general model for three phase inverters operating in healthy and faulty modes

The paper presents the experimental verification of a general mathematical model of Voltage Source Inverters (VSI) able to simulate fault conditions and which is also useful for the simulation of fault-tolerant systems for different applications. In general, in the past, the problem of faulty inverters modeling has been addressed specifically by considering faults on the different phases as separate cases. Furthermore, traditional models include only the faulty mode and not the healthy mode, so resulting then not able to predict transient phenomena. The model hereafter presented overcomes this drawback. It was formulated by introducing the concept of “healthy leg binary variables”. Such variables allow the management of both unfaulted and faulted conditions regardless of what is the faulty phase. Experimental tests were used to verify the correctness of the followed modeling approach and the ability of the model to predict transients before, during and after the application of a fault tolerant control.