A New Hybrid Fault-Tolerant Converter Based on Five-Level Active Neutral Point Clamped Inverter

Performance of converters in the event of a fault in the semiconductor devices is very important in many critical applications. If one of their semiconductor devices is defective, the converter will not be able to continue operating, and this will cause a lot of damage in various sectors, including industry. Therefore, having converters with fault tolerance is very important. This paper presents a new hybrid fault tolerant structure to maintain the performance of the active neutral point clamped (ANPC) five-level (5L) inverter. To achieve this, a modified T-type converter has been added to the traditional ANPC 5L inverter. In the proposed structure, by increasing the number of switching states and creating redundant switching states for all output voltage levels, it is possible to continue the operation of the main inverter in the conditions of short-circuit fault and open-circuit of the switches. In this case, in the event of a fault, all output voltage levels are maintained. Evaluation of the proposed converter performance in case of faulty switches is performed in MATLAB/Simulink environment and its results are presented in this paper