A Cost-Reliability Trade-Off Fault-Tolerant Series-Resonant Converter Combining Redundancy and Reconstruction

• Published in: IEEE transactions on power electronics Vol. 36; no. 10; pp. 11543 - 11554
• Main Authors: Huang, Jiangming, Chen, Guipeng, Shi, Haochen
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.10.2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Capacitors; Circuit faults; Component reliability; Converters; Cost analysis; Cost-reliability trade-off; Fault tolerance; Fault tolerant systems; fault-tolerant; Redundancy; Reliability; Reliability analysis; Semiconductor diodes; series-resonant converter (SRC); Short circuits; Switches; Topology; topology reconstruction; Tradeoffs
• ISSN: 0885-8993; 1941-0107
• DOI: 10.1109/TPEL.2021.3072383

Adding redundant converters or switches are two common strategies to achieve fault-tolerant operation of converters. The former one is straightforward but costly, while the latter one is cost-effective but with sacrifice on the reliability as it only works for switches' failure. Aiming to achieve a good trade-off between cost and reliability, a novel fault-tolerant full-bridge series-resonant converter (FB-SRC) which only needs a redundant half-bridge SRC (HB-SRC) to gain fault tolerance for all fault-prone components is proposed in this article. The proposed converter can keep working normally when short-circuit fault or open-circuit fault happens on switches, diodes, or the output filter capacitor. After fault occurs, the redundant HB-SRC converter will combine the remaining healthy part of original FB-SRC to reconstruct an input-parallel and output-series dual HB-SRC, which can maintain the rated output power with reduced cost. In the article, component's reliability of SRC is first analyzed. Then, operation and performance analysis of the proposed fault-tolerant converter is introduced in detail. As the voltage/current stresses of components are almost the same during the prefault and postfault operation, the converter design is simple. Finally, experimental results of a 500 W prototype are also given to verify the effectiveness.