Time–Frequency EPFCN for Fault Warning and Diagnosis of Multi-Phase Interleaved Converters in DC Microgrids

DC microgrids are important platforms for renewable energy integration, energy storage interaction, and bidirectional power exchange. In these systems, multi-phase interleaved parallel DC-DC converters are widely used as key energy-router interfaces, but open-circuit faults in power devices may lead to current imbalance, waveform distortion, ripple redistribution, and system instability. To improve fault warning and diagnosis under variable operating conditions, this paper proposes a time–frequency dual-branch efficient fully convolutional network (EPFCN). The proposed model takes synchronized multi-channel voltage/current signals and their FFT-domain representations as complementary inputs. The time-domain branch extracts transient waveform features, while the FFT-domain branch captures spectral variation and harmonic-related information. An efficient channel attention (ECA) module is introduced to enhance fault-sensitive channel responses while maintaining a lightweight structure. An RT-LAB hardware-in-the-loop platform is established to construct a multi-condition diagnostic dataset covering one normal state and nine fault states. Experimental results show that the proposed EPFCN achieves high diagnostic accuracy, strong noise robustness, clear feature separability, and feasible edge-side inference performance. The proposed method provides an effective data-driven solution for online fault warning and diagnosis of multi-phase interleaved converters in DC microgrids.