Qian Xu

Fault detection can increase the reliability and efficiency of power electronic converters employed in power systems. Among the converters in the power system, a Neutral Point Clamped (NPC) three-level inverter is most commonly used to drive electric motors. In this paper, a new approach for open-circuit fault detection and location of the NPC three-level inverter for a shifting process using a constant voltage-to-frequency ratio is proposed. In order to diagnose open-circuit fault in as short a time as possible, an adaptive electrical period partition (AEPP) algorithm is proposed to pick single electrical periods from real-time three-phase current signals. The Maximal Overlap Discrete Wavelet Transformation (MODWT) and Park’s Vector Modulus (PVM) are used for feature analysis and normalization of electrical period signals. The statistical characteristics of the electrical period signals are extracted, and a random forest model is constructed to realize the state classification. Compared with the traditional fault diagnosis method, the proposed algorithm finds fault locations quickly and accurately. The effectiveness and accuracy of the proposed algorithm are verified by experiments.

The relationship between the short circuit ratio (SCR) and static voltage stability is analyzed in this paper. According to eigenvalue decomposition method, a novel concept named generalized short circuit ratio (gSCR) has been proposed for multi-infeed LCC-HVDC (MIDC) systems to mathematically measure the connect-ed AC strength from the point view of voltage stability, which can overcome the rule-of-thumb basis of existing multi-infeed short circuit ratio (MISCR) concept. In gSCR, two indices, the critical gSCR (CgSCR) and the boundary gSCR (BgSCR) are developed to quantitatively evaluate if the connected AC system is strong or weak, in which CgSCR=2 and BgSCR=3 are two critical values for strength evaluation. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of the proposed gSCR concept.