Three-phase six-level multilevel voltage source inverter: Modeling and experimental validation

• Published in: Micromachines
• Main Author: Meraj S.T.; Yahaya N.Z.; Hasan K.; Hossain Lipu M.S.; Masaoud A.; Ali S.H.M.; Hussain A.; Othman M.M.; Mumtaz F.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI 2021
• Online Access: https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85115607514&doi=10.3390%2fmi12091133&partnerID=40&md5=f985c369ef901af5ba7b1d17e5c11f47

This research proposes a three-phase six-level multilevel inverter depending on twelve-switch three-phase Bridge and multilevel DC-link. The proposed architecture increases the number of voltage levels with less power components than conventional inverters such as the flying capacitor, cascaded H-bridge, diode-clamped and other recently established multilevel inverter topologies. The multilevel DC-link circuit is constructed by connecting three distinct DC voltage supplies, such as single DC supply, half-bridge and full-bridge cells. The purpose of both full-bridge and half-bridge cells is to provide a variable DC voltage with a common voltage step to the three-phase bridge’s mid-point. A vector modulation technique is also employed to achieve the desired output voltage waveforms. The proposed inverter can operate as a six-level or two-level inverter, depending on the magnitude of the modulation indexes. To guarantee the feasibility of the proposed configuration, the proposed inverter’s prototype is developed, and the experimental results are provided. The proposed inverter showed good performance with high efficiency of 97.59% following the IEEE 1547 standard. The current harmonics of the proposed inverter was also minimized to only 5.8%. © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.