Experimental Investigation on the Performances of a Multilevel Inverter Using a Field Programmable Gate Array-Based Control System

Guido Ala,Marco Trapanese,Massimo Caruso,Rosario Miceli,Giuseppe Schettino,Filippo Pellitteri,Fabio Viola

doi:10.3390/en12061016

Guido Ala, Marco Trapanese + Show 5 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/en12061016

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Journal: Energies	Publication Date: Mar 15, 2019
Citations: 27	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Palermo

Abstract

The Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) represents a valid solution for the design of control systems for inverters adopted in many industry applications, because of both its high flexibility of use and its high-performance with respect to other types of digital controllers. In this context, this paper presents an experimental investigation on the harmonic content of the voltages produced by a three-phase, five level cascaded H-Bridge Multilevel inverter with an FPGA-based control board, aiming also to evaluate the performance of the FPGA through the implementation of the main common modulation techniques and the comparison between simulation and experimental results. The control algorithms are implemented by means of the VHDL programming language. The output voltage waveforms, which have been obtained by applying to the inverter the main PWM techniques, are compared in terms of THD%. Simulation and experimental results are analyzed, compared and finally discussed.

Highlights

Over the last decades, the technological advances of software for the implementation of digital systems, which are generally finalized to the control of specific applications, has significantly contributed to the simplification of the design processes of digital controllers dedicated for the electrical energy conversion [1]
This paper aims to present a detailed investigation and experimental validation on the performances in terms of harmonic distortion of the voltages produced by a cascade h-bridge multilevel inverter, defined in Section 2, controlled by an Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and for several modulation techniques
In order to determine the harmonic content of the voltage waveforms produced by a CHBMI

Summary

Introduction

The technological advances of software for the implementation of digital systems, which are generally finalized to the control of specific applications, has significantly contributed to the simplification of the design processes of digital controllers dedicated for the electrical energy conversion [1]. The Digital Signal Processor (DSP) is a very wide-spread digital controller that allows the implementation of control algorithms through a purely software programming The previously mentioned feature allows the realization of a system of logic operations developed in parallel, reducing the computing time and leading to the achievement of high-performance control systems, which can be even compared with equivalent controllers composed by analogical components [2,3,4,5]. According to [1,2,6], the latter can overcome to some of the major

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Conclusion