On the Reliability of Electrical Drives for Safety-Critical Applications

The aim of this work is to present some issues related to fault tolerant electric drives, which are able to overcome different types of faults occurring in the sensors, in the power converter and in the electrical machine, without compromising the overall functionality of the system. These features are of utmost importance in safety-critical applications. In this paper, the reliability of both commercial and innovative drive configurations, which use redundant hardware and suitable control algorithms, will be investigated for the most common types of fault: besides standard three phase motor drives, also multiphase topologies, open-end winding solutions, multi-machine configurations will be analyzed, applied to various electric motor technologies. The complexity of hardware and control strategies will also be compared in this paper, since this has a tremendous impact on the investment costs.