Three-phase five level diode clamped inverter for AC load interfacing in DC Microgrid

Abstract

In this paper, diode clamped type three-phase five-level inverter is used for AC load interfacing in DC microgrid. Multilevel inverters generate staircase voltage waveform with a series of power semiconductor switches from several layer voltage DC sources. Therefore, the output voltage waveforms in multilevel inverters can be generated at low switching frequency with high efficiency and low distortion. In two-level inverter, various pulse width modulation (PWM) strategies with high switching frequency is required to obtain a output voltage or a current waveform with a small amount of harmonic content. In existing DC microgrid, three-phase conventional two-level Sine-PWM inverter is used and so, total harmonic distortion (THD) is high. To reduce the THD and the size of AC filter and to get the quality output, diode clamped type three-phase five-level inverter is applied in this research. Level shift multi carrier Sine-PWM method is used for the diode clamped circuit topology. The output waveforms of conventional two-level inverter and diode clamped five-level inverter are measured and compared the each output waveform qualities such as voltage THD, current THD and AC filter size. The performance of five level diode clamped inverter is illustrated by PSIM software and experimental results are carried out with prototype.