Fault detection and reconfiguration of the 12-pulse thyristor rectifier

Providing power through a silicon-controlled rectifier (SCR) is still commercially efficient. This type of rectifier is a well-known choice for converters in the high power range. Especially new exciter with SCR exciter is proliferating in generators. Monitoring, supervision, and safety checking of this kind of converter could increase reliability and decrease the risk of losses and penalties for interrupting the power supply of susceptible systems. In this paper, a fast, simple, robust fault detection and identification system with a small number of calculations have been proposed to detect open circuit fault of three-phase SCR (6-pulse, 12-pulse…). In addition, a strategy to reconfigure a 12-pulse converter is proposed. The simulation in MATLAB/SIMULINK has shown the acceptable performance of the proposed algorithm.