Fast short circuit power switch fault detection in cascaded H-bridge multilevel converter

Multilevel converters are being widely used in a large number of power electronics applications. Due to the increased number of switching devices, they are more likely to have faults in their switches than the conventional converters. In order to have a balanced operation after a short circuit power switch fault occurrence, it is necessary to detect the fault location. In this paper, a fast power switch fault detection method is presented to identify the fault location. This method only needs one additional voltage sensor per phase, and is faster compared to most of the existing methods. Also it is easy for implementation on a FPGA chip. The proposed method is verified by computer simulations.