Experimental Evaluation of the Performance of a Three-Phase Five-Level Cascaded H-Bridge Inverter by Means FPGA-Based Control Board for Grid Connected Applications

Abstract

Over the last decades, plants devoted to the generation of green energy significantly increased their number, together with the demand of same electrical energy, also stored in battery systems. This fact produced the growth of energy conversion systems with advanced performances with respect to the traditional ones. In this circumstance, multilevel converters play a significant role for their great advantages in performances, flexibility, fault-tolerability, employment of renewable energy sources and storage systems and finally yet importantly reduced filter requirements. In this context, this paper faces the performance of a cascaded H-bridge 5 level inverter in terms of harmonic distortion generated and injected into the grid. Through an accurate analysis that takes into account the pulse width modulation (PWM) multicarrier modulation techniques (phase disposition PD, phase opposition disposition POD, alternative phase opposition disposition APOD, phase shifted PS) and related reference signals (sinusoidal reference; third harmonic injection THI reference, switching frequency optimal SFO reference), a framework of distorting harmonics is presented by comparing twelve cases. The results obtained from the simulations are reproduced and validated in a prototype system of five level cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter. A deep discussion of control and filtering system is provided to justify the choice of the best modulation technique to adopt.

Analysis and Implementation of Multilevel Inverter for Full Electric Aircraft Drives

“…A megawatt scale medium voltage three level active neutral point clamped power converter is proposed for high efficiency and high density aircraft hybrid propulsion systems in [12]. The paper [13] gives the detailed analysis for different modulation techniques and the LCL filter requirements using a five-level CHB inverter. The space agencies like NASA are exploiting the possibility of MLI for FEA application.…”

Experimental Investigation on the Performances of a Multilevel Inverter Using a Field Programmable Gate Array-Based Control System

“…The PWM techniques adopted for multilevel converters, namely MC PWM [35][36][37][38][39][40], are usually the same as those applied for traditional converters. The common techniques for Multilevel Power Inverter (MPI) use several triangular carrier signals and one modulating signal per phase.…”

Three-Phase Five-Level Cascade Quasi-Switched Boost Inverter

“…The benefits of the multilevel power inverter topologies are as follows: improved output waveforms, low electromagnetic interference (EMI), and small filter size [1][2][3]. Neutral point clamped (NPC), flying capacitors, and cascaded H-bridge (CHB) inverters [4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] are three basic multilevel inverter structures. Among these structures, the CHB structures [9][10][11][12][13][14] have unique merits: higher output voltage, flexibility, and power levels.…”

“…However, the traditional CHB inverter [9][10][11][12][13][14] is a buck DC-AC power conversion. In addition, both power switches in the same branch cannot be turned on at the same time.…”