A Reliable Fault Tolerant Inverter

A reliable fault tolerant inverter is presented to overcome switch open-circuit faults. The proposed circuit consists of four uni-directional and two bi-directional switches. The proposed topology delivers 7-levels output voltage in symmetrical configuration. It has six solid-state relays to isolate the faulty switch. These relays help in maintaining output voltage and power magnitude for an open circuit fault in any switch. A comparative analysis of the proposed topology is performed with Cascaded H-Bridge (CHB) in terms of number of switches, number of relays, output voltage magnitude and reliability. The proposed inverter is simulated in MATLAB/SIMULINK and its reliable nature is justified using a developed hardware setup.