Fault investigation in cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter through fast fourier transform and artificial neural network approach

In recent times, multilevel inverters are used as a high priority in many sizeable industrial drive applications. However, the reliability and performance of multilevel inverters are affected by the failure of power electronic switches. In this paper, the failure of power electronic switches of multilevel inverters is identified with the help of a high-performance diagnostic system during the open switch and low condition. Experimental and simulation analysis was carried out on five levels cascaded h-bridge multilevel inverter, and its output voltage waveforms were synthesized at different switch fault cases and different modulation index parameter values. Salient frequencydomain features of the output voltage signal were extracted using a Fast Fourier Transform decomposition technique. The real-time work of the proposed fault diagnostic system was implemented through the LabVIEW software. The Offline Artificial neural network was trained using the MATLAB software, and the overall system parameters were transferred to the LabVIEW real-time system. With the proposed method, it is possible to identify the individual faulty switch of multilevel inverters successfully.