Distributed Fault-Tolerant Powertrain Configuration for Electric Vehicle Applications With Pole-Phase Modulation

In electric vehicle applications, the requirement of fault-tolerant survivability, better power/torque distribution, and highly efficient systems will help to shift toward multiphase induction motors (MIMs). The MIMs are driven with multiphase power converters, where the usage of a higher order of switches escalate failure possibilities. For attaining the better fault tolerance of switch faults, many inverter configurations are established in the literature; however, these studies have not addressed the multiple switch faults in different inverter legs. Moreover, for the source fault of the multiphase drive, the entire system has to be halted. In this article, a distributed powertrain structure is proposed for electric vehicle applications to fulfil the gaps in the aforementioned critical issues. A fault-tolerant multiphase inverter (FTMI) fed nine-phase induction motor (NPIM) drive is proposed with a lesser number of auxiliary components, such as switches and fuses. The proposed FTMI has effectively utilized the concept of pole-phase modulation (PPM) for NPIM, which helps in operating the drive at two possible modes (9-phase 4-pole and 3-phase 12-pole). With this additional flexibility of PPM, the proposed FTMI fed NPIM drive is capable to operate with full load power during the single/multiple switch open/short-circuit faults and source faults contrary to the existing techniques. The pros and cons of the proposed fault-tolerant drive configuration are presented with a clear comparison over existed fault-tolerant drive configurations. The practicability of the proposed FTMI fed NPIM drive is validated by performing various experiments.