Design of a fault tolerant control system for a NPC multilevel inverter

This paper gives a solution to implement a reconfigurable embedded controller for a NPC inverter. Redundancies in semiconductor configurations are used to enable a minimal operation with faulty power switches. The fault tolerance is obtained by the use of a particular control system architecture where modulated voltages are directly imposed and corresponding switch configurations are determined by a connection controller. In case of failure events, the technique consists in a reconfiguration of the conversion controller.