High Performance Parallel Single-Phase Converter Reconfiguration for Enhanced Availability

Paralleling power converters is a common practice in industries to enhance total power rating, reliability, and availability of the system. In case of fault occurring in systems with parallel converters, the faulty power converter can be isolated and the system can still be operated at reduced power level. In this paper, a grid-connected power converter consisting of two parallel H-bridge converter, with low ground leakage current, is considered. Two contingency configurations, that are also of low ground leakage current, are proposed to enhance the availability of the system. This is done by reconfiguring the power circuit to a single H-bridge, in the case of failure in one of the bridges. The power converter is experimentally tested with the proposed configurations for experimental validation. The results show that, the second configuration has better performance in terms of power loss and current THD when operating at lower power level.