Multilevel inverters, for their distinctive performance, have been widely used in high voltage and high-power applications in recent years. As power electronics equipment reliability is very important and to ensure multilevel inverter systems stable operation, it is important to detect and locate faults as quickly as possible. In this context and to improve fault diagnosis accuracy and efficiency of a cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter system (CHMLIS), a fault diagnosis strategy based on the principle component analysis and the multiclass relevance vector machine (PCA-mRVM), is elaborated and proposed in this paper. First, CHMLIS output voltage signals are selected as input fault classification characteristic signals. Then, a fast Fourier transform is used to preprocess these signals. PCA is used to extract fault signals features and to reduce samples dimensions. Finally, an mRVM model is used to classify faulty samples. Compared to traditional approaches, the proposed PCA-mRVM strategy not only achieves higher model sparsity and shorter diagnosis time, but also provides probabilistic outputs for every class membership. Experimental tests are carried out to highlight the proposed PCA-mRVM diagnosis performances.

The development and application of marine current energy are attracting more and more attention around the world. Due to the hardness of its working environment, it is important and difficult to study the fault diagnosis of a marine current generation system. In this paper, an underwater image is chosen as the fault-diagnosing signal, after different sensors are compared. This paper proposes a diagnosis method based on the sparse autoencoder (SA) and softmax regression (SR). The SA is used to extract the features and SR is used to classify them. Images are used to monitor whether the blade is attached by benthos and to determine its corresponding degree of attachment. Compared with other methods, the experiment results show that the proposed method can diagnose the blade attachment with higher accuracy.