An Active Redundancy Module and Overlapped Switching Scheme for incorporating Fault Tolerance and ZVS in Isolated DC-DC Converters

Recent years have seen power electronic converters rapidly approach high power densities while also being designed for high power capabilities. Owing to their effectiveness in energy conversion and control, modern power electronic converters have gained significant popularity in critical applications. Thus, the reliability and robustness of these converters to faults becomes an important area of research. This paper proposes an active redundancy module (ARM) and overlapped switching scheme as a modular, topology independent fault tolerant solution to be utilised for isolated DC-DC converters. The proposed ARM allows for convenient incorporation of fault tolerance in any given power converter topology without altering its fundamental principles of operation, and the overlapped switching scheme facilitates soft switching and current sharing within the ARM, thus reducing losses and improving the overall performance of the ARM. The proposed solution is analysed and validated through simulation as well as experimental results, followed by a discussion in comparison to existing fault tolerant solutions.