Single-Phase Five-Level Multiswitch Fault-Tolerant Inverter

A novel fault-tolerant (FT) multilevel inverter (MLI) to deal with both open- and short-circuit faults on the single and multiple switches is presented in this article. It is formed by combining the main circuit and a redundant unit. With the help of a redundant unit, the proposed MLI preserves the same output power under any fault conditions as that of healthy mode. In addition, the inverter has equal efficiency under healthy and faulty scenarios for the given operating conditions. The redundant unit of the proposed FTMLI reduces the current stress on the main circuit switches under overload conditions. To validate the capabilities of the proposed MLI in tolerating the different faults, various simulation and experimental studies are carried out, and the corresponding results are presented in this article. The superior features, such as low device count, higher efficiency, and lower total blocking voltage, make the proposed MLI a reliable candidate for emergency loads. To showcase the better performance of the proposed topology over other recent topologies, comprehensive evaluation and comparisons in terms of component count and functionality are presented.