New three-phase multilevel inverter with shared power switches

Abstract

Despite the advantages offered by multilevel inverters, one of the main drawbacks that prevents their widespread use is their circuit complexity as the number of power switches employed is usually high. This paper presents a new multilevel inverter topology with a considerable reduction in the number of power switches used through the switch-sharing approach. The fact that the proposed inverter applies two bidirectional power switches for sharing among the three phases does not prevent it from producing seven levels in the line-to-line output voltage waveforms. A modified scheme of space vector modulation via the application of virtual voltage vectors is developed to generate the PWM signals of the power switches. The performance of the proposed inverter is investigated through MATLAB/SIMULINK simulations and is practically tested using a laboratory prototype with a DSP-based modulator. The results demonstrate the satisfactory performance of the inverter and verify the effectiveness of the modulation method.