An Intelligent Electronic Fuse (iFuse) to Enable Short-Circuit Fault-Tolerant Operation of Power Electronic Converters

The present paper proposes a novel device defined as an intelligent electronic fuse (iFuse) meant to be connected in series with any current-bidirectional voltage-unidirectional active switch present in a given converter. The iFuse duty is to isolate its series- associated switch from the rest of the converter circuit immediately after detecting that said switch has failed in short circuit. Nonetheless, it maintains the reverse (free- wheeling) current path originally offered by the failed switch. The failure detection is performed when the failed switch causes a shoot-through event. Therefore, the iFuse is designed to be able to block the elevated current occurring in such event. The iFuse allows increasing the fault-tolerant capability and the reliability of power converters where such qualities are hindered by switch short-circuit failures, as in converters featuring parallelized switches, neutral-point-clamped multilevel topologies, or redundant legs. The feasibility of the iFuse device is verified through experimental tests, proving that the device is able to detect the failure of its associated switch and isolate it from the rest of the converter circuit in 6 μs, while stopping short-circuit currents of up to 1 kA without incurring in harmful di/dt values.