Intelligent Fault Diagnosis Framework for Modular Multilevel Converters in HVDC Transmission

Open circuit failure mode in insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBT) is one of the most common faults in modular multilevel converters (MMCs). Several techniques for MMC fault diagnosis based on threshold parameters have been proposed, but very few studies have considered artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. Using thresholds has the difficulty of selecting suitable threshold values for different operating conditions. In addition, very little attention has been paid to the importance of developing fast and accurate techniques for the real-life application of open-circuit failures of IGBT fault diagnosis. To achieve high classification accuracy and reduced computation time, a fault diagnosis framework with a combination of the AC-side three-phase current, and the upper and lower bridges’ currents of the MMCs to automatically classify health conditions of MMCs is proposed. In this framework, the principal component analysis (PCA) is used for feature extraction. Then, two classification algorithms—multiclass support vector machine (SVM) based on error-correcting output codes (ECOC) and multinomial logistic regression (MLR)—are used for classification. The effectiveness of the proposed framework is validated by a two-terminal simulation model of the MMC-high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission power system using PSCAD/EMTDC software. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed framework is highly effective in diagnosing the health conditions of MMCs compared to recently published results.