Analysis of Current Distortion of Three-Phase Voltage Source Rectifiers and its Application in Fault Diagnosis

The open-switch fault of three-phase voltage source rectifiers (VSR) may lead to ac current distortion. In the past decade, some current-based fault diagnosis methods have been proposed, which directly used the phenomenon of current distortion but lacked a detailed analysis of the cause of it. In this paper, the current distortion of VSR with unity power factor operation is analyzed from two aspects: the effect of the three-phase switching state on the ac current and the response of the VSR control system after the fault. Besides, the impact of the VSR system and control parameters on the current distortion is also discussed. The analysis verifies the feasibility of the distortion current for fault diagnosis, providing a theoretical basis for current-based fault diagnosis methods of VSRs. To substantiate the analysis of the distorted current, we designed a simplified fault diagnosis method, which determined the faulty phase by the difference of the normalized three-phase distorted current, and located the faulty switch by the grid voltage angle. The experiments are conducted to verify the analysis of current distortion and the reliability of the proposed fault diagnosis method.