A Single-Carrier Modulation Strategy for the Reduction of the DC-Link Voltage Ripple of a 5-Level Multilevel DC-Link Inverter

Abstract

This paper presents a simple single-carrier PWM (SC-PWM) method based on the multi-modulation technique and using the redundant switching states of the 5-level hybrid multilevel dc-link inverter to balance the dc-link voltage. The proposed SC-PWM reduces the dc-link capacitor-voltage ripple, thereby reducing the voltage stress on the switches and improving the reliability of the inverter by eliminating all the low-fundamental frequency voltage oscillations in the capacitor voltage in the full range of power factors. Additionally, the proposed modulation strategy achieves a 2-fold reduction in the size of the output filter while reducing the total harmonic distortion of the output voltage and current. The feasibility of the proposed scheme over other modulation techniques is confirmed in a comparative analysis. Finally, the steady-state performances of the SC-PWM strategy are demonstrated in simulations and experiments.