Special Session on Advances in Fault Tolerance and Resilience in Power Conversion Systems

The growing demand for safety, reliability, maintainability, and survivability in power conversion systems has drawn significant research in the design of resilient or fault-tolerant systems, namely systems, which are designed to tolerate some faults or able to promptly adapt the control law (fault-tolerant control) in such a way as to preserve pre-specified satisfactory performances in terms of production quality, safety, etc. The need for these resilient or fault-tolerant systems has inspired much research for the particular case of electric machines drives. The majority of these contributions have been focused on faults in the machine or the drive components while current trends include sensors and application fault modes. Indeed, the overall performance of electric motor/generator drives with a feedback structure depends not only on the health of the motor itself but also on the performance of the driving circuits and sensors (encoder, voltage sensors, and current sensors).

High reliability can indeed be achieved with robust or oversized systems but the industrial tendency, in particular for emerging applications, which are characterized by high survivability requirements such as offshore and marine renewable energy systems or embedded applications (i.e. aircraft, spatial, or marine electrical systems), is to design fault-tolerant power conversion systems. These systems include redundancy by adopting specific machines and drive configurations such as multiphase or multi-windings/multi-converters systems.