Embedded fault diagnosis and prognosis

The increasing use of power electronics in industry applications, energy conversion, electric vehicles (EVs), aircrafts, vessels, etc. propels efforts at early detection of potential abnormalities, which can degrade system performance, in order to reduce profit losses and even risk to human lives. In the onset of the power electronics digital control era, microprocessors were used exclusively for control tasks, mainly due to the lack in computing power needed by diagnosis algorithms. Nowadays, powerful low-cost microprocessors have become standard options for the design engineer, and embedded routines that perform real-time fault diagnosis are easily added to the design. This chapter gathers the most relevant embedded techniques for real-time condition monitoring (CM) and fault diagnosis in power drives based systems that have been reported recent years, with special emphasis on those methods using electric variables (i.e., voltage and current) as health indicators of the involved devices.