• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.16 no.6
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• pp.2076-2084
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• 2016

In this paper, a novel scheme to eliminate common-mode voltage (CMV) is proposed for three-level neutral-point clamped (NPC) inverters. In the proposed scheme, a low-power full-bridge converter is utilized to produce compensatory voltage for CMV, which is injected into an NPC inverter through a single-phase four-winding transformer. With the proposed circuit, the power range for applications is not limited, and the maximum modulation index of the inverter is not reduced. These features are suitable for high-power medium-voltage machine drives. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by simulation and experimental results.

• Proceedings of the KIPE Conference
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• 2003.07b
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• pp.560-564
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• 2003

This paper proposes a simple control strategy based on the discontinuous PWM(DPWM) to balance the DC-link voltage of three-level Neutral-Point-Clamped(WPC) inverters at low modulation index. New DPWM methods in multi-level inverter are also introduced. The proposed DPWM method changes the path and duration to flow the neutral point current out of or into neutral point of the DC-link and it makes the overall fluctuation of the DC-link voltage zero during a sampling time of reference voltage vector. Therefore, the voltage of the DC-link can be balanced fairly well and also the voltage ripple of the DC-link is reduced significantly. Moreover, comparing with conventional methods, the proposed strategy is very simple. The validity of the proposed DPWM method is verified by experiment

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.451-462
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• 2016

Photovoltaic energy conversion becomes main focus of many researches due to its promising potential as source for future electricity and has many advantages than the other alternative energy sources like wind, solar, ocean, biomass, geothermal etc. In Photovoltaic power generation multilevel inverters play a vital role in power conversion. The three different topologies, diode-clamped (neutral-point clamped) inverter, capacitor-clamped (flying capacitor) inverter and cascaded h-bridge multilevel inverter are widely used in these multilevel inverters. Among the three topologies, cascaded h-bridge multilevel inverter is more suitable for photovoltaic applications since each pv array can act as a separate dc source for each h-bridge module. This paper presents a single phase Cascaded H-bridge five level inverter for grid-connected photovoltaic application using sinusoidal pulse width modulation technique. This inverter output voltage waveform reduces the harmonics in the generated current and the filtering effort at the input. The control strategy allows the independent control of each dc-link voltages and tracks the maximum power point of PV strings. This topology can inject to the grid sinusoidal input currents with unity power factor and achieves low harmonic distortion. A PID control algorithm is implemented in Arm Processor LPC2148. The validity of the proposed inverter is verified through simulation and is implemented in a single phase 100W prototype. The results of hardware are compared with simulation results. The proposed system offers improved performance over conventional three level inverter in terms of THD.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Power Electronics
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• v.2 no.3
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• pp.51-57
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• 1997

A new current controlled PWM technique with N.P.C structure is proposed in this paper. A current controlled PWM technique with neutral-point-clamped pulsewidth modulation inverter composed of main switching devices which operates as switches for PWM and auxiliary switching devices to clamp the output terminal potential to the neutral point potential is described. This inverter output contains less harmonic content as compared with that of a conventional current controlled PWM type. In addition, the proposed current controlled PWM technique has lower switching frequency than that of conventional current controlled PWM technique at the same current limit. Two inverters are compared analytically. The improved voltage waveform of current controlled PWM with N.P.C structure is analyzed and the performance is investigated by the computer simulation.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Power Electronics
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• v.24 no.2
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• pp.120-126
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• 2019

This study proposes a neutral voltage balance control scheme for stable fault-tolerant operation of an active neutral point clamped (ANPC) inverter using carrier-based pulse width modulation. The proposed scheme maintains the neutral voltage balance by reconfiguring the switching combination and modulating the reference output voltage in order to solve the degradation of the output characteristic in the fault tolerant operation due to the fault of the power semiconductor switch constituting the ANPC inverter. The feasibility of the proposed control scheme is confirmed by HIL experiment using RT-BOX.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.10 no.3
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• pp.1066-1074
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• 2015

This paper presents the reverse recovery characteristic according to the change of switching states when Si diode and SiC diode are used as clamp diode and proposes a method to minimize the switching loss containing the reverse recovery loss in the neutral-point-clamped inverter at low modulation index. The previous papers introduce many multiple circuits replacing Si diode with SiC diode to reduce the switching loss. In the neutral-point-clamped inverter, the switching loss can be also reduced by replacing device in the clamp diode. However, the switching loss in IGBT is large and the reduced switching loss cannot be still neglected. It is expected that the reverse recovery effect can be infrequent and the switching loss can be considerably reduced by the proposed method. Therefore, it is also possible to operate the inverter at the higher frequency with the better system efficiency and reduce the volume, weight and cost of filters and heatsink. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by numerical analysis and experiment results.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Power Electronics
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.337-343
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• 2015

The multi-level inverters are highly efficient for high-power and medium-voltage AC driving applications, such as high-speed railway systems and renewable energy resources, because such inverters generate lower total harmonic distortion (THD) and electromagnetic interface (EMI). Lower switching stress occurs on switching devices compared with conventional two-level inverters. Depending on the multi-level inverter topology, the required components and number of switching devices are different, influencing the overall efficiency. Comparative studies of multi-level inverters based on loss analysis and output characteristic are necessary to apply multi-level inverters in high-power AC conversion systems. This paper proposes a theoretical loss analysis method based on piecewise linearization of characteristic curves of power semiconductor devices as well as loss analysis and output performance comparison of five-level neutral-point clamped, flying capacitor inverters, and high-level cascaded H-bridge multi-level inverters.

• Proceedings of the KIPE Conference
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• 2001.10a
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• pp.369-373
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• 2001

Multilevel inverter has attracted great interest in high-voltage high-power field because of its less distorted output. In this paper, a direct torque control (DTC) technique based on a three-level neutral-point-clamped (NPC) inverter is presented. In order to solve the intrinsic neutral-point voltage-balancing problem and to obtain a high performance DTC, a special vector selection method is introduced and the concept of virtual vector is developed. By using the proposed PWM strategy, a MRAS speed sensor-less DTC drive can be achieved without sensing the neutral-point voltage, The strategy can be verified by simulation and experimental results.

• Proceedings of the KIPE Conference
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• 2003.11a
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• pp.11-16
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• 2003

The 3-level converter/inverter system is very efficient in the ac motor drives of high voltage and high power application. This paper proposed a simple method to diagnose faults using change of current vector pattern in space vector diagram when the faults occurrence in the 3-level inverter and a control method that can protect system from unbalance of the neutral point voltage according to faults. The validity of the proposed method is demonstrated by the simulation results.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.1207-1216
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• 2015

In order to suppress the low frequency oscillation of the neutral-point voltage for three-level inverters, this paper proposes a new discontinuous pulse width modulation (DPWM) control method. The conventional sinusoidal pulse width modulation (SPWM) control has no effect on balancing the neutral-point voltage. Based on the basic control principle of DPWM, the relationship between the reference space voltage vector and the neutral-point current is analyzed. The proposed method suppresses the low frequency oscillation of the neutral-point voltage by keeping the switches of a certain phase no switching in one carrier cycle. So the operating time of the positive and negative small vectors is equal. Comparing with the conventional SPWM control method, the proposed DPWM control method suppresses the low frequency oscillation of the neutral-point voltage, decreases the output waveform harmonics, and increases both the output waveform quality and the system efficiency. An experiment has been realized by a neutral-point clamped (NPC) three-level inverter prototype based on STM32F407-CPLD. The experimental results verify the correctness of the theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the proposed DPWM method.