Abstract:

Fault tolerance is a very important aspect of design from the standpoint of reliability for electric vehicles (EVs). Propulsion motors in EVs are typically controlled by voltage source inverters (VSIs). Thus, achieving fault tolerance against faults occurring in switching devices is of paramount interest. Prior research shows that faulty power semi-conductor devices contribute to a significant portion of the total fault conditions in drive configurations. The semi-conductor switch faults are of two types, namely, open-circuit faults (OCF) and short-circuit faults (SCF). To verify the economic feasibility of the proposed drive configurations, cost-analysis is carried out for the proposed drive configurations. The cost analysis reveals that, compared to the conventional BLDC motor drives, the proposed fault-tolerant systems incur affordable additional raw material costs. All the fault-tolerant circuit topologies proposed in this thesis are first simulated using MATLAB/SIMULINK and the results are verified by implementing these schemes on a three-phase, 250 Watt, 48 Volts, and 3200 RPM BLDC motor using dSPACE1104 as the control platform.