Sensors & Transducers, Vol. 161, Issue 12, December 2013, pp.

162-169

Sensors & Transducers

2013 by IFSA
http://www.sensorsportal.com

IGBT Open-Circuit Fault Diagnosis Method

Based on KPCA and LS-SVM
Xiaodong Yang, Chonglin Wang, Liping Shi, Zhenglong Xia
School of Information and Electrical Engineering China University of Mining and Technology,
NanHu School Area China University of Mining and Technology,
QuanShan District Xuzhou City JiangSu Prov., 221116, China
Tel.: +86-13775890411, fax: +86-051661886377
E-mail: 24661883@qq.com

Received: 18 September 2013 /Accepted: 22 November 2013 /Published: 30 December 2013

Abstract: A new fault diagnosis method is proposed in this paper to overcome the shortcomings of the
traditional methods for insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) open-circuit fault diagnosis such as long time
need and sensitive to load change. An experiment platform of the 660 V H-bridge static synchronous
compensator (STATCOM) is built to test the proposed method. For the H-bridge structure is easy to realize the
capacitor voltage balance, the average value of the three phase capacitor voltage is selected as the original signal
to avoid the misdiagnosis of load change. The features of the original signal are extracted by using the theory of
wavelet packet transform. Dimensionality reduction method based on kernel principal component analysis
(KPCA) is chosen to improve the diagnosis speed. Finally, the fault classifier is constructed via the least squares
support vector machine (LS-SVM). The test results show that the method has good accuracy and real-time
performance. Copyright 2013 IFSA.

Keywords: IGBT, Fault diagnosis, Wavelet packet transform, KPCA, LS-SVM.

1. Introduction diagnosis to ensure that the device continues to

Researchers have been paying close attention to
the static synchronous compensator (STATCOM)
because of its wide applicability in electrical power
systems. As one of the core devices in flexible
alternating current transmission systems (FACTS),
the STATCOM has advantages such as quick and
continuous adjustability, low harmony, low
dissipation, a wide range, and high reliability.
The reliability of the STATCOM system is
directly related to the safe operation of the power
grid. With its fault-tolerant control capabilities, the
STATCOM system has become a research hotspot
[1-5]. The STATCOM can diagnose faults in a timely
manner as well as reconstruct both the software and
hardware structures of the system upon fault
operate safely without any reduction in performance
indicators. Research on the fault-tolerant control of
the STATCOM focuses on topology and control
strategy. Limited research on the timely and accurate
diagnosis of faults has been conducted. The
precondition of a fault-tolerant control system is
accurate fault diagnosis followed by the adjustment
of software and hardware in accordance with the
implementation of the fault-tolerant control
of the system.
The insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT)
power module is one of the core devices in the
STATCOM inverter. The characteristics of the IGBT
power module include large input impedance, low
power, high switch speed, high frequency, and high
capacity. The failure of the IGBT power module

162 Article number P_1697