Abstract
One of the key challenges in multilevel inverters (MLIs) design is to reduce the number of components used in the implementation while maximising the number of output voltage levels. This paper proposes a new concept that facilitates a device count reduction technique of existing cascaded MLIs. Moreover, the proposed concept can be utilised to extend existing single phase cascaded MLI topologies to three-phase structure without tripling the number of semiconductor components and input dc-supplies as per the current practice. The new generalized concept involves two stages; namely, cascaded stage and phase generator stage. The phase generator stage is a combination of a conventional three-phase two level inverter and three bi-directional switches while the cascaded stage can employ any existing cascaded topology. A laboratory prototype model is built and extensive experimental analyses are conducted to validate the feasibility of the proposed cascaded MLI concept.
Highlights
Multilevel inverters (MLIs) have drawn much attention in renewable, vehicular and industrial applications [1,2,3,4,5,6]
The main goal of this paper is to introduce a new generalized cascaded MLI (CMLI) topology that could be employed to extend any existing single-phase CMLI topology to a three-phase structure without employed to extend any existing single-phase CMLI topology to a three-phase structure without tripling the devices used within the single-phase structure
This paper presents a new design for a three-phase cascaded H-bridge (CHB) MLI
Summary
Multilevel inverters (MLIs) have drawn much attention in renewable, vehicular and industrial applications [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Conventional MLIs include diode clamped or neutral point clamped (NPC), flying capacitor (FC) and cascaded H-bridge (CHB) MLI. Among these types, CHB MLI has been found very reliable in high voltage/high power applications (6.6–13.8 kV, 500 MVA) [8,9]. Several cascaded MLI topologies comprise two main parts; level generator and polarity generator as shown in Figure 1a can be found in the literature [12,13,14,15]. The level generator is a cascaded connection of a number of inverter cells that generates multilevel unipolar voltage while the polarity generator converts this unipolar voltage into bipolar voltage waveform [13]. The level generator switches may work with high frequency, but the polarity generator switches always function at line voltage frequency [13]
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