In this paper, a novel failure-detection technique and its analog circuit for insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs), under open- and short-circuit failures, are proposed. This technique is applied to a three-phase induction-motor (IM) drive system. The detection technique is adapted to detect failures of short-circuit and open-circuit in the IGBT, which is based on gate-signal monitoring. The most important issue of this technique is the reduction of time for fault detection. This is very important in a failure-tolerant IM drive based on the material-redundancy approach or protection systems since the detection must be done before the device is damaged, in approximately less than 10 μs. The experimental test and simulations are presented in order to validate the proposed fault-detection technique, and it is validated, achieving replacement of the damaged element in the most suitable time.

This paper presents the analysis and design of an electronic failure detection system applied to the insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT), this proposal is based on the direct measurement of behavior of the gate signal during the turn-on transient. The failures by short-circuit and open-circuit devices only are considered in this paper. To achieve early detection, the IGBT gate signal behavior during turn-on transient is used and to increase the effectiveness of the detection and to tolerate the variations of input to system, adaptable thresholds have been added to the analog electronics circuit implemented. The experimental tests are presented in order to validate the proposed fault-detection technique.

The main function of multilevel inverters is to synthesize a desired AC voltage output starting from several input levels of direct current voltage. There are several circuit topologies and modulation strategies to generate the desired output voltage of an inverter, among which stands out the traditional Sine Pulse Width Modulation (SPWM) technique with several variants. Phase Disposition (PD), Phase Opposition Disposition (POD) and, Alternate Phase Opposition Disposition (APOD); are presented considering switching frequencies, the spectrum of the output waveform of the inverter, and total harmonic distortion. In this paper, the SPWM techniques are studied due to its easy implementation and for being the most widely used family of multilevel converters, applied to the 9-level Asymmetrical Cascaded Multilevel Inverter (ACMLI) with the trinary structure, which is not a traditional case by means of a simulation environment.

The use of Inductive Wireless Power Transfer (IWPT) varies from low-power applications such as mobile phones and tablets chargers to high-power electric vehicles chargers. DC–DC converters are used in IWPT systems, and their design needs to consider the demand of high efficiency in the power transfer. In this paper, a DC–DC power converter for IWPT is proposed. Its topology uses a DC–AC converter in the transmitter circuit and an AC–DC converter in the receptor. The transmitter has an interleaved coupled-Buck converter that integrates two Buck converters connected to a half inverter bridge and a parallel resonant load. The control strategy implemented for the semiconductor switching devices allows two operating modes to obtain a sinusoidal output voltage with a low distortion that makes it suitable in high-efficiency power transfer systems. To obtain a DC output voltage, a full wave bridge rectifier is used in the receptor circuit. The proposed topology and the control strategy are validated with simulation and experimental results for a 15 W prototype.

Among the photovoltaic (PV) systems, the ones interconnected to the electric system have presented a greater growth in the developed countries. In order to transform the generated DC energy in AC energy ready to be delivered to a grid, the concept of AC Module is applied. However, the problem of generating quality voltage to the network from a single PV module arises. As a solution, the topology of the buck-boost converter with tapped inductor (TI) is studied. The purpose is selecting a converter appropriated for an integrated PV inverter, with high benefits without isolation, applied to residential use with connection to a single-phase grid. Its performance is evaluated by means of the electronic simulator PSpice and it is verified with a prototype. From the collected data it is appreciated that the proposed inverter increases the voltage gain and the efficiency with respect to traditional converter.