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Abstract

Fault-tolerant control (FTC) techniques have the potential to significantly enhance the dependability of voltage source inverters (VSI) and are becoming popular. This study presents an innovative fault tolerance approach for designing a very dependable induction motor drive (IMD) that incorporates both analytical (active) and hardware redundancies. The created model aims to enhance fault tolerance against the current sensor, speed sensor, and IGBT switch failures in the inverter module. The Active Fault Tolerant Control System (AFTCS) has been applied to the speed sensor to detect any faults in the sensor. If a fault is detected, the system will replace the defective value with an estimated value for open loop speed estimation. This estimation is based on a flux estimation observer. The fault tolerance of the current sensors is designed such that to replace the defective value with the average value of the other two functional current sensors in the event of a failure in one sensor assuming that only one sensor gets faulty at a time. The Fault Detection and Isolation (FDI) unit is designed to rapidly identify and replace a defective switch with a backup redundant switch in the shortest possible timeframe. The stability and convergence of the observer is also proved using the Lyapunov theorem. The use of Markov chains in the reliability investigation further substantiated the system's exceptional dependability. To evaluate the effectiveness of the suggested approach, a variable-speed induction motor with a power capacity of 1.1kW is constructed using MATLAB/Simulink. A 3-phase inverter and fault detector unit are implemented on an STM32-Nucleo-F103RB board with hardware-in-the-loop capability to validate the accuracy of the simulation results to highlight the robustness of the developed active fault-tolerant control. The simulation results coupled with the hardware-in-the-loop experiment demonstrate that the IM drive maintains its stability with little performance degradation in the events of faults in the speed and current sensors as well as inverter switches. Finally, a comparison with the existing literature was carried out to showcase the improved performance and heightened dependability of the proposed model.

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