http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/5610941/5624686/05624745.pdf

Power electronics

This paper presents an overview of motor drive technologies used for safety-critical aerospace applications, with a particular focus placed on the choice of candidate machines and their drive topologies. Aircraft applications demand high reliability, high availability, and high power density while aiming to reduce weight, complexity, fuel consumption, operational costs, and environmental impact. New electric driven systems can meet these requirements and also provide significant technical and economic improvements over conventional mechanical, hydraulic, or pneumatic systems. Fault-tolerant motor drives can be achieved by partitioning and redundancy through the use of multichannel three-phase systems or multiple single-phase modules. Analytical methods are adopted to compare caged induction, reluctance, and PM motor technologies and their relative merits. The analysis suggests that the dual (or triple) three-phase PMAC motor drive may be a favored choice for general aerospace applications, striking a balance between necessary redundancy and undue complexity, while maintaining a balanced operation following a failure. The modular single-phase approach offers a good compromise between size and complexity but suffers from high total harmonic distortion of the supply and high torque ripple when faulted. For each specific aircraft application, a parametrical optimization of the suitable motor configuration is needed through a coupled electromagnetic and thermal analysis, and should be verified by finite-element analysis.

Overview of Electric Motor Technologies Used for More Electric Aircraft (MEA)

Power electronics plays an important role in a wide range of applications in order to achieve high efficiency and performance. Increasing efforts are being made to improve the reliability of power electronics systems to ensure compliance with more stringent constraints on cost, safety, and availability in different applications. This paper presents an overview of the major failure mechanisms of IGBT modules and their handling methods in power converter systems improving reliability. The major failure mechanisms of IGBT modules are presented first, and methods for predicting lifetime and estimating the junction temperature of IGBT modules are then discussed. Subsequently, different methods for detecting open- and short-circuit faults are presented. Finally, fault-tolerant strategies for improving the reliability of power electronic systems under field operation are explained and compared in terms of performance and cost.

Study and Handling Methods of Power IGBT Module Failures in Power Electronic Converter Systems

With wide-spread application of power electronic converters in high power systems, there has been a growing interest in system reliability analysis and fault-tolerant capabilities. This paper presents a comprehensive review of conventional fault-tolerant techniques regarding power electronic converters in case of power semiconductor device failures. These techniques can be classified into four categories based on the type of hardware redundancy unit: switch-level, leg-level, module-level, and system-level. Also, various fault-tolerant methods are assessed according to cost, complexity, performance, etc. The intent of this review is to provide a detailed picture regarding the current landscape of research in power electronic fault-handling mechanisms.

Survey on Fault-Tolerant Techniques for Power Electronic Converters

Recently, research concerning electrical machines and drives condition monitoring and fault diagnosis has experienced extraordinarily dynamic activity. The increasing importance of these energy conversion devices and their widespread use in uncountable applications have motivated significant research efforts. This paper presents an analysis of the state of the art in this field. The analyzed contributions were published in most relevant journals and magazines or presented in either specific conferences in the area or more broadly scoped events.

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Advances in Electrical Machine, Power Electronic, and Drive Condition Monitoring and Fault Detection: State of the Art

This paper describes an experimental tool to evaluate and support the development of fault-tolerant machines designed for aerospace motor drives. Aerospace applications involve essentially safety-critical systems which should be able to overcome hardware or software faults and therefore need to be fault tolerant. A way of achieving this is to introduce variable degrees of redundancy into the system by duplicating one or all of the operations within the system itself. Looking at motor drives, multiphase machines, such as multiphase brushless dc machines, are considered to be good candidates in the design of fault-tolerant aerospace motor drives. This paper introduces a multiphase two-level inverter using a flexible and reliable field-programmable gate-array/digital-signal-processor controller for data acquisition, motor control, and fault monitoring to study the fault tolerance of such systems.

Multiphase Power Converter Drive for Fault-Tolerant Machine Development in Aerospace Applications

This paper describes a novel fault-tolerant matrix converter motor drive system which requires an appropriate control strategy and the application of an effective fault detection technique. Two types of fault-tolerant matrix converter, a direct matrix converter and an indirect matrix converter, are proposed for a permanent magnet synchronous motor drive against open-circuit faults in safety-critical applications. A fault-tolerant control strategy is developed in order to maintain the continuous operation of the drive system with satisfactory performance. A high-speed fault detection strategy for detecting and identifying the faulty open-circuited switches located in the fault-tolerant four-phase direct matrix converter is also proposed. Simulation and experimental results are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed fault-tolerant matrix converters and the developed fault detection strategy applied to the motor drive system under faulty operating conditions.

Fault-Tolerant Matrix Converter Motor Drives With Fault Detection of Open Switch Faults

A fault-tolerant matrix converter drive topology, which can be effectively used to drive a permanent magnet synchronous motor for research in critical applications, with particularly emphasis on aerospace applications, is presented. The proposed matrix converter configuration, a four output-phase matrix converter, uses a normally redundant output phase connected between the input supply and the neutral point of the motor in order to provide fault-tolerant capability in the presence of faults. This proposed fault-tolerant matrix converter can deal with open-circuit faults caused by failures in either the power converter or machine windings. Without using any additional connecting devices and without modifying the modulation technique, the satisfactory system performance under faulty operating conditions can be achieved using the developed control strategy. The space vector representation of the direct space vector modulation technique is adaptable so that the technique used for a conventional three-phase matrix converter can be applied to the four-phase matrix converter even in the fault-tolerant mode. The verification of the proposed fault-tolerant matrix converter drive is confirmed using extensive simulation and experimental results.

Fault-tolerant, matrix converter, permanent magnet synchronous motor drive for open-circuit failures

A Novel High Step-up DC-DC Converter for Photovoltaic Applications☆

This paper proposes two types of fault tolerant matrix converter drive topologies, namely a four-leg single-stage matrix converter and a four-leg two-stage matrix converter, both used to drive a permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) against open phase failure in aerospace applications. To improve the reliability of the drive system under open phase fault the motor neutral is connected to the fourth leg of each matrix converter without modifying the space vector modulation techniques. To maintain a satisfactory system performance the control strategy needs to be modified during fault occurrence so that the motor is able to operate continuously with minimum torque ripple. The simulation results of both proposed matrix converter drive topologies, under healthy and unhealthy conditions are presented to demonstrate the capability of the proposed fault tolerant drives. Moreover, the experimental results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the four-leg matrix converter drive's ability to keep the motor running with only a small performance degradation under open phase fault.

Sudarat Khwan-on

Papers

Multiphase Power Converter Drive for Fault-Tolerant Machine Development in Aerospace Applications

Fault-Tolerant Matrix Converter Motor Drives With Fault Detection of Open Switch Faults

Fault-tolerant, matrix converter, permanent magnet synchronous motor drive for open-circuit failures

A Novel High Step-up DC-DC Converter for Photovoltaic Applications☆

Fault tolerant four-leg matrix converter drive topologies for aerospace applications