IGBT Open-Circuit Fault Diagnosis for MMC Submodules Based on Weighted-Amplitude Permutation Entropy and DS Evidence Fusion Theory

Modular multilevel converters (MMCs) have a complex structure and a large number of submodules (SMs). If there is a fault in one of the SMs, it will affect the reliable operation of the system. Therefore, rapid fault diagnosis and accurate fault positioning are crucial to ensuring the continuous operation of the system. However, the IGBT open-circuit faults in different submodules of MMCs have similar fault features, and the traditional fault feature extraction method cannot effectively extract the key features of the fault so as to accurately locate the faulty submodules. In response to this problem, this paper proposes a fault diagnosis method based on weighted-amplitude permutation entropy (WAPE) and DS evidence fusion theory. The simulation results show that WAPE has better feature extraction ability than basic permutation entropy, and the fused multiscale feature decision output has better diagnostic accuracy than the single-scale feature. Compared with traditional fault diagnosis methods, this method achieves the diagnosis of multiple fault types by collecting a single signal, which greatly reduces the number of samples and leads to higher diagnostic accuracy and faster diagnostic speed