A Family of Series-Resonant DC-DC Converter with Fault-Tolerance Capability

The series-resonant dc-dc converter (SRC) is widely applied in a large range of voltage and power. In most applications, fault tolerance is a highly desired feature and it is obtained through redundancy. This paper proposes a fault-tolerance solution for the SRC, which could drastically reduce the need of redundancy. Using the proposed scheme, the full-bridge-based SRC or multilevel-based SRC can be reconfigured in a half-bridge topology, in order to keep the converter operational even with the failure (open circuit or short circuit) of one switch. Since the proposed scheme can be applied to the full-bridge-SRC and multilevel SRC, a family of fault-tolerant converter is proposed in this work. The advantages of the proposed approach are minimum of additional hardware and no deterioration of the converter efficiency. The proposed fault-tolerance solution was experimentally tested in a 10 kW SRC prototype with input voltage of 700-600 V. A short-circuit fault in a semiconductor is tested and the results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed approach.