• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.18 no.5
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• pp.1608-1617
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• 2018

The rapid and correct isolation of faulty submodules (SMs) is of great importance for improving the reliability of modular multilevel converters (MMCs). Therefore, a fast diagnosis method containing fault detection and fault location determination was presented in this paper. An improved incremental predictive model of arm current was proposed to detect failures, and the multi-step prediction method was used to eliminate the negative impact of disturbances. Moreover, a control method was proposed to strengthen the fault characteristics to rapidly locate faulty arms and faulty SMs by detecting the variation rate of the SM capacitor voltage. The proposed method can rapidly and easily locate faulty SMs under different load conditions without the need for additional sensors. The experimental results have validated the effectiveness of the proposed method by using a single-phase MMC with four SMs per arm.