A Survey of Open Circuit Switch Fault Diagnosis Techniques for Multilevel Inverters Based on Signal Processing Strategies

Multilevel inverters have been greatly spread and utilized in industry especially for high power and voltage ranges. However, these inverters have high number of elements which thereby boost the probability for switch failure. Unfortunately, switch faults will affect the system reliability and may lead to system damage completely if not detected and isolated rapidly. Among the failures, Open Circuit (OC) faults are the most critical ones which are widely investigated in literature. Hence, this paper presents a survey about fault detection strategies based on signal processing methods for OC faults in different multilevel inverter topologies. First of all, fault diagnosis approaches for OC switch failure are divided into two categories and explained briefly. Then, signal processing techniques are investigated in details. Further, specific criteria are developed to evaluate proposed methods in literature. Then, broad literature review of applied techniques is compared and summed up into three tables. Finally, a general conclusion is presented.