Abstract
The current climatic scenario requires the use of innovative solutions to increase the production of electricity from renewable energy sources. Multilevel Power Inverters are a promising solution to improve the penetration of renewable energy sources into the electrical grid. Moreover, the performance of MPIs is a function of the modulation strategy employed and of its features (modulation index and switching frequency). This paper presents an extended and experimental analysis of three-phase five-level Cascaded H-Bridges Multilevel Inverter performance in terms of efficiency and harmonic content considering several MC PWM modulation strategies. In detail, the CHBMI performance is analyzed by varying the modulation index and the switching frequency. For control purposes, the NI System On Module sbRIO-9651 control board, a dedicated FPGA-based control board for power electronics and drive applications programmable in the LabVIEW environment, is used. The paper describes the modulation strategies implementation, the test bench set-up, and the experimental investigations carried out. The results obtained in terms of Total Harmonic Distorsion (THD) and efficiency are analyzed, compared, and discussed.
Highlights
In the last decade, the interests of scientific, industrial, and political communities focused on environmental issues, in particular on future catastrophic climate scenarios currently foreseen with temperature increases of up to 2 ◦C [1,2]
This paper aims to perform an extended and experimental analysis of a three-phase five-level Cascaded H-Bridge Multilevel Inverter (CHBMI) performance in terms of efficiency and harmonic content when ten Multicarrier Pulse Width Modulations (MC PWM) modulation strategies are employed
The experimental tests are conducted by supplying the RL load for different values of the AC output power, by changing the modulation index, and for different values of the switching frequency
Summary
The interests of scientific, industrial, and political communities focused on environmental issues, in particular on future catastrophic climate scenarios currently foreseen with temperature increases of up to 2 ◦C [1,2]. Many efforts of scientific and industrial communities have focused on the research and development of innovative technologies to increase the penetration of renewable sources into the production of electrical energy, trying to satisfy the goals of sustainable development and energy savings. Most applications of energy production from renewable sources employ traditional two-level Voltage Source Inverters (VSIs) that present several operative limitations for greater penetration of renewable energy sources into the electrical grid, such as high harmonic content and control flexibility. The main performance indicator of a power converter is the harmonic distortion in the output voltages For this reason, in order to evaluate the harmonic distortion of a VSI and its impact in different fields of applications, several indices have been proposed in the literature, as discussed in [4]. A new concept of the power conversion systems, called “Smart Inverters”, is developing, in which inverters perform additional functions (e.g., self-governing, self-adapting, and self-healing features), as reported in [5]
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