Despite of remarkable technological achievements reached in power electronics (both for devices and circuits) faults remains inevitable, being the main cause of power systems interrupts and failures. In the last decade the fault problem in power electronics has been investigated with more attention both from theoretical and experimental point of view. Following these trends, this paper is focused to introduce a novel mathematical model specially developed for simulation of faults in current-source inverters (CSIs) operating in high reliability servo-drive applications. By approaching a generalized fault-tolerant model development, it has been designed a CSI model able to simulate both unfaulty and faulty conditions when one or more power electronic devices fails in operation. In this way the drawback of building a separately model and a separately simulation program for each operation mode (both for unfaulty and faulty states) has been eliminated. The generalized model has been validated via careful computer-aided simulations in Matlab/Simulink software environment. In order to compare the obtained results in different failure states various faulty-state power converter architectures has been considered, their operating conditions being tested in a servo-drive application.
