A comprehensive review of fault diagnosis and fault-tolerant control techniques for modular multi-level converters

Background: Many faults occur in the modular multi-level converters (MMCs), including unbalancing capacitor voltage, lower and upper arm unbalancing, the line to line voltage unbalancing, sensors and actuators fault, system fault, and sub-modules fault in high as well as medium voltage applications.

Introduction: Several fault-tolerant approaches are presented to overcome these problems, such as active fault-tolerant control system (AFTCS), passive fault-tolerant control system (PFTCS), hybrid fault-tolerant control system (HFTCS), redundant system technique, special power circuit with the controller, and zero sequence voltage methods, which we will explain extensively in this article.

Methodology: This review emphasizes the types of faults in the MMCs and discusses the protection methods under failure conditions. The MMC is more popular in high voltage applications because it not only improves the quality of the grid but also has good harmonic performance in high power transmission. There is no need for any isolated dc sources to operate it. When faults are removed, the efficiency and reliability of the system will be increased.

Results: This extensive explanation of the current literature on MMC fault diagnosis and control techniques will conclude which methods provide a more valuable solution. Finally, this paper discusses the best approach to reduce MMC faults and provides a future research direction to the readers.