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http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s43236-022-00481-3

A novel medium voltage five-level converter with minimized volume  

Deng, Zhifeng (School of Electrical Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University)
Liu, Jinjun (School of Electrical Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University)
Du, Sixing (School of Electrical Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University)
Publication Information
Journal of Power Electronics / v.22, no.10, 2022 , pp. 1676-1686 More about this Journal
Abstract
In applications such as ship propulsion and of-shore wind power generation, it is important to minimize the volume of medium voltage power converters. To make this possible, a novel five-level converter topology is proposed in this paper. This converter is realized by connecting two half-bridge (HB) cells with a three-level neutral point clamped (3L-NPC) unit. In each HB cell, the switches are directly clamped to DC side capacitors where the larger volume high-voltage flying capacitors are avoided. By adopting the 3L-NPC unit, the volume of the proposed converter is further reduced. A comprehensive comparison result shows that the volume of the proposed converter is more than 7% less than existing five-level converters. The operation principle and modulation method of this converter are also introduced. Based on the phase-shift pulse width modulation (PS-PWM) method, the capacitor voltages of the proposed converter can be self-balanced. Simulation and experiment results are shown to verify the performance of this converter and the validity of the theoretical analysis.
Keywords
Multilevel converter; Medium voltage high power; DC-AC power conversion; Phase-shift pulse width modulation;
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Times Cited By KSCI : 1  (Citation Analysis)
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