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Multilevel inverters (MLIs) are used in a variety of industrial applications in high- and medium-voltage systems. The modularity, high-power output from medium voltages, and low harmonic content are some of the advantages of MLIs. The reliability of MLIs is quite important. The reliability is affected by different kinds of faults occurring in the MLIs. In MLI circuits, switching devices are the most vulnerable components and have a major involvement in all types of faults. As an outcome, it is necessary to take proper corrective action in the event of a fault. This work provides a comprehensive review of different fault tolerant (FT) solutions for MLIs in the event of switch fault. Moreover, various single-phase FT MLI topologies are reviewed, along with their constructional features, merits, and demerits. This work also proposes a comparison approach that integrates novel factors to account for fault tolerance quantitatively. A comparison investigation verifies the effectiveness of the proposed method. The FT operation of an existing five-level FT MLI topology is discussed, simulated, and experimentally verified.

The standalone microgrids with renewable energy resources (RERs) such as a photovoltaic (PV) system and fast changing loads face major challenges in terms of reliability and power management due to a lack of inherent inertial support from RERs and their intermittent nature. Thus, energy storage technologies such as battery energy storage (BES) are typically used to mitigate the power fluctuations and maintain a power balance in the system. This paper presents a model predictive control (MPC) based power management strategy (PMS) for such standalone PV/battery systems. The proposed method is equipped with an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) prediction method to forecast the load and environmental parameters. The proposed controller has the capabilities of (1) effective power management, (2) minimization of transients during disturbances, and (3) automatic switching of the operation of the PV between the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) mode and power-curtailed mode that prevents the overcharging of the battery and at the same time maximize the PV utilization. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been verified through a comprehensive simulation-based analysis.