1770 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS, VOL. 45, NO. 5, SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2009
A Literature Review of IGBT Fault Diagnostic
and Protection Methods for Power Inverters
Bin Lu, Senior Member, IEEE, and Santosh K. Sharma
Abstract—This paper presents a survey on existing methods for
fault diagnosis and protection of insulated gate bipolar transistors
with special focus on those used in three-phase power inverters.
Twenty-one methods for open-circuit faults and ten methods for
short-circuit faults are evaluated and summarized, based on their
performance and implementation efforts. The gate-misfiring faults
and their diagnostic methods are also briefly discussed. Finally, the
promising methods are recommended for future work.
Index Terms—Fault diagnosis, gate-misfiring fault, insulated
gate bipolar transistor (IGBT), open-circuit fault, power inverter,
short-circuit fault.
I. INTRODUCTION
V
OLTAGE-SOURCE inverters (VSIs) are widely used in
motor drive and power quality applications. It is estimated
that about 38% of the faults in variable-speed ac drives in
industry are due to failures of power devices [1]. Most of these
inverters use insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) as the
power device because of their high voltage and current ratings
and ability to handle short-circuit currents for periods exceed-
ing 10 μs. Although IGBTs are rugged, they suffer failures due
to excess electrical and thermal stress that are experienced in
many applications. IGBT failures can be broadly categorized
as open-circuit faults, short-circuit faults, and intermittent gate-
misfiring faults. Various IGBT fault diagnostic and protection
methods have been developed during the last decade. The main
purpose of this paper is to conduct a comprehensive review of
these works.
II. G
ATE-DRIVE OPEN-CIRCUIT FAULT
A gate-drive open-circuit fault may happen due to lifting of
bonding wires caused by thermic cycling. It may be caused
by a driver fault or a short-circuit-fault-induced IGBT rupture.
Open-circuit faults lead to dc current offset in both the faulty
and healthy phase. The interaction between the dc component
and the field generates a pulsating torque at the stator current
frequency, which may substantially reduce the maximum av-
erage torque available to the drive [2]. The dc currents also
Paper 2008-PEDCC-115, presented at the 2008 Industry Applications So-
ciety Annual Meeting, Edmonton, AB, Canada, October 5–9, and approved
for publication in the IEE E T
RANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS
by the Power Electronics Devices and Components Committee of the IEEE
Industry Applications Society. Manuscript submitted for review October 27,
2008 and released for publication April 3, 2009. First published July 14, 2009;
current version published September 18, 2009.
B. Lu is with the Innovation Center, Eaton Corporation, Milwaukee, WI
53216 USA (e-mail: binlu@ieee.org).
S. K. Sharma is with the India Engineering Center, Eaton Corporation,
Pune 411014, India (e-mail: santoshkrsharma@eaton.com).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIA.2009.2027535
TAB LE I
D
EFECT TRANSISTOR LOCALIZATION BY PARK’S VECTOR METHOD
generate unequal stress in the upper and lower transistors.
These effects may cause secondary faults in the inverter, motor,
or load. The voltages and currents carry the fault signatures and
hence can be analyzed to detect and locate the fault. Open-
circuit faults generally do not cause system shutdown, but
degrade its performance. Therefore, these diagnostic methods
can be used in device-fault-tolerant systems.
A. Detection Methods
1) Park’s Vector Method [3]: In this method, open-circuit
fault detection and defect transistor localization are accom-
plished by calculating the position of the current trajectory’s
midpoint, which is the mean value of the ac current space vector
over one period.
First, the three-phase average currents are calculated. Then,
Park’s vector transformation is applied to obtain the magnitude
and phase angle of the ac currents in t he complex domain.
For a normal system, the mean (magnitude) value is zero and
the space vector trajectory is a circle. If a fault occurs, the
magnitude of the space vector is nonzero and greater than a
threshold. The defect transistor is i dentified by the phase angle,
as shown in Table I.
2) Normalized DC Current Method [4], [5]: This is an
improvement over the Park’s Vector Method, which has a
major drawback of being load dependent. To make the fault
detection independent of load, normalized dc current is used
and is given by
γ
a,b,c
=
I
a,b,c
av
a
2
1,(a,b,c)
+ b
2
1,(a,b,c)
(1)
where I
a,b,c
av
is the average phase current, and a
1,(a,b,c)
and
b
1,(a,b,c)
are the fundamental coefficients of the three-phase
currents. This normalized value is calculated for each phase.
To identify the faulty IGBT, the resulting residual, γ
a,b,c
is
compared with a threshold 0.45, reported to be a universal
value derived from experience.
0093-9994/$26.00 © 2009 IEEE