Fault-Tolerant Control of a Multiphase Series Capacitor Buck Converter in a Master–Slave Configuration for Powering a Particle Accelerator Electromagnet

Multiphase DC/DC power converter architectures have recently been investigated for powering the superconducting electromagnets in the High-Luminosity (HL) upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, targeting high-performance figures and reliability. In terms of control, a master–slave voltage/current regulation configuration was previously proposed by the authors as an alternative to other well-known cascaded options. In this work, fault-tolerant features (i.e., diagnosis and reconfiguration under open-circuit switch faults) are incorporated into the aforementioned proposal. These features are highly desirable, as physics experiments—which can last for several hours—should not be interrupted in the event of a recoverable fault in the powering system. Simulation and experimental results are provided, demonstrating the correctness of the proposed fault-tolerant scheme.