A new fault-tolerant five-level inverter with integration of dual triac switches for sustainable energy applications

Multilevel inverters are essential for maintaining the functionality of safety-critical applications. This article describes the Triac-Assisted fault-tolerant (FT) 5-L inverter (TFT5LI), which is developed to withstand the single and simultaneous multiple switches’ open circuit (OC) faults. It is designed by connecting a redundant switch unit to the main circuit. The main switch fault can be avoided by detecting and diagnosing the fault in a shorter period of time to continue the healthy operation. The suggested TFT5LI maintains the same output power as the healthy mode in all fault scenarios with the aid of a redundant unit. The results of simulated and experimental investigations under different faulty scenarios, that confirms the proposed TFT5LI’s ability to withstand the faults for 1,000 W output power, have been presented. The efficiency of the proposed converter was found to be 97.9 % under healthy conditions, with a current THD as 0.58 %, and the level to switch ratio is to be calculated as 0.45. This is a dependable option for emergency loads because of its improved qualities, which include a reduced device count, increased efficiency, a level-to-switch ratio, and a lower overall blocking voltage. To support the findings, comparative analysis along with component count analysis is presented in detail to show the effectiveness of the proposed topology over other modern topologies. A cost analysis of the proposed TFT5LI has been carried out to highlight its economic benefits.