An Improved Fault-Tolerant Power Converter for Electric Vehicle Propulsion

In this paper, an improved fault-tolerant power conversion system for Electric Vehicles (EV) propulsion is presented. An open-switch fault in EV propulsion power converters is detected using combined fault detection methodologies. An improved fault-tolerant control is proposed by bypassing the gating signal of the faulty switch to the fault-tolerant switch. The novel part of the proposed topology is the reduced number of bypassed TRIACs. Besides, the fault-tolerant capability is introduced not only in the inverter side but also in the DC-DC boost converter side. The circuit configuration, operation, and analysis are performed in PSIM software. To prove the practical feasibility of the proposed fault-tolerant control, real-time Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) testing of a DSP controller is performed and its results are presented.