Current Reconstruction Techniques for Survivable Three-Phase PWM Converters

In high-performance three-phase pulsewidth-modulated (PWM) converter systems used in generator and motor drives, failure of current sensors will directly interrupt the system performance, and will even cause disastrous consequences. Redundancy in design is one of the popular choices to overcome this issue. However, this usually leads to an undesirable increase in size and cost. This letter presents two novel model-independent current reconstruction methods for three-phase PWM converter systems based on space vector modulation. Using the proposed sensor placement and software algorithm, phase currents within a three-phase converter can be reconstructed to an acceptable level of accuracy under single-survived-sensor ($S^3$) scenario. A hardware prototype is built and fault tolerant algorithm is implemented using a DSP (TMS320F2812). Experiments are conducted under worst-case scenario to verify the flexibility of sensor placement/converter layout and software algorithm.