Power Quality Savings with Controlled Fault-Tolerant Power Converters

Power quality is simply the interaction of electrical power with electrical equipments. If electrical equipments operate correctly and reliably without being damaged or stressed, a suitable level of power quality is assured. On the other hand, if the electrical equipment malfunctions, is unreliable, or is damaged during normal usage, power quality is poor and probably the economical loss could be preeminent over the technical one. In the scenario of the Distributed generation power quality issues will be more- over important because an higher dissemination of power conditioning equip- ment will be requested and this obviously will increase the sources of vulnera- bility for the electrical systems. In the present paper fault tolerant power converters are considered as a viable solutions of power quality problem solution and a suitable control algorithm is also presented. The control hereafter presented is based on the model of the power converter reformulated in terms of healthy leg binary variable, and the paper shows as this control is able to save the aspect of power quality when the converter works in the linear range. The effectiveness of such an algorithm and of the fault tolerant power converters are finally verified through computer simulations.