Monitoring and fault diagnosis of DC-DC multistage converter for hybrid electric vehicles

Advancements in high-power semiconductor technology have opened new avenues for application of power electronics converters. However, system level fault detection issues are yet to be addressed. A representative (hybrid vehicle automotive power system) multistage DC/DC converter consisting of two cascaded buck-converters is used for fault detection. Faults are introduced on the converters. Type of fault is detected from the measurement of available terminal voltages/currents in load and source converters. Analytical formulations developed are compared with simulated results for identifying fault signatures under different fault scenarios.