Fault-tolerant design for a three-level neutral-point-clamped multilevel inverter topology

This paper presents a modified topology of the neutral-point-clamped inverter suitable to increase the converter reliability in safety-critical applications. With the proposed scheme, the energy processing capacity can be maintained even for multiple failure modes. Its fault-tolerant ability results from redundancy of power devices and from modifications in the control strategy. The theoretical validity of the proposed solution is confirmed by simulation results.