Multilevel Inverters with Reduced Component Count for Energy Systems

Abstract

Multilevel inverters (MLIs) have gained increasing interest for advanced energy-conversion systems with a wide range of voltage levels, due to their attractive features of low harmonic contents, low dv/dt stress, low filtering requirements, low switching frequency, low electromagnetic interference (EMI), and employing low-rated semiconductor devices for producing high voltages. Further, some MLIs have a modularity feature, facilitating voltage and current scalability with high redundancy in switching states, allowing for fault-tolerant operations. The mentioned features are directly related to the number of generated voltage levels. However, enlarging level count renders challenges of requiring massive component counts, including DC sources, capacitors, power diodes, switches, inductors, and transformers. The high count of components negatively affects the size, cost, efficiency, lifespan, reliability, complexity of MLI-based energy conversion systems. Thus, proposing novel MLIs, which can enlarge the voltage level number with a low component count, is currently one of the most attractive topics in this research theme. In this dissertation, four three-phase topologies are proposed to mitigate the aforementioned shortcomings. Two transformerless topologies are proposed for low- and medium voltage applications, while two transformer-based topologies are intended for medium- and high-voltage applications. The proposed topologies have the key features of being capacitor-, diode-free, and low counts of DC sources, switches, and transformers. Further, three of them have a high modularity degree, allowing for higher voltage operations without increasing the voltage stress across the switches. The working principle of the proposed topologies are theoretically demonstrated, numerically verified, and experimentally validated through an in-house experimental setup. The effectiveness of the proposed topologies is proven through detailed comparative studies regarding component counts and voltage ratings. The proposed topologies are briefly described in this dissertation, while detailed explanations and results can be found in the appended papers.