Electrical machines, drives, and their associated power electronics, namely, converters and capacitors, play a key role in an ever increasingly technological society. Transportation electrification, renewable energies, and more efficient buildings are just some of the areas where the intensive application of these systems has been most noticed. This book addresses voltage source inverter (VSI)fed drives, switched reluctance machine (SRM) drives, high-power synchronous machine drives, capacitors, and DC-DC converters. The scope of the book encompasses the issues related to fault analysis, fault detection and isolation, diagnostics, prognostics, condition monitoring, post-fault reconfiguration, remedial operation, robust control, and fault tolerance of electromechatronic systems.

Switched reluctance machine drives present a unique ability for fault-tolerant applications due to a high level of electric and magnetic independence between motor phases. This feature allows the machine to keep running with a high degree of safety and low-performance degradation, when a fault occurs in one or more phases. A fault in one of the system phases, either a motor winding fault or a power converter switch fault, can be detected and isolated without causing harmful effects in the other phases. Performance degradation is, of course, proportional to the number of faulty phases. Therefore, fault diagnosis is essential to isolate the fault and promote control and/or hardware reconfigurations to achieve a better performance. In this chapter, the following issues will be addressed: Overall characteristics of switched reluctance motor (SRM) drives; Comprehensive SRM drives fault analysis; Description of suitable diagnostic techniques oriented to machine faults and/or power converter faults; Analysis of diagnostic techniques for open- and/or short-circuit fault detection in power switches that provide faulty element identification;Post-fault reconfiguration strategies based on control reconfiguration and/or hardware reconfiguration.

The book chapter presents the main capacitor technologies, giving a particular emphasis on capacitors commonly used in power converters. The main capacitor diagnostic techniques developed to date are then reviewed in the following sections. Finally, a summary, challenges and future research directions is presented.