Experimental Comparative Analysis of Efficiency and THD for a Three-phase Five-level Cascaded H-Bridge Inverter Controlled by Several MC-PWM Schemes

Abstract

Cascaded H-Bridges Multilevel Inverters are an innovative and promising solution in different application fields. This topology allows obtaining an improvement in the performance (e.g. reduced harmonic content, the low voltage stress on power components, and high efficiency) in respect to the traditional two-level inverters. In this context, the Multicarrier-PWM strategies play an important role thanks to their features. This paper presents an experimental investigation on the performance of a three-phase five-level Cascaded H-Bridge inverter by using different PWM modulation strategies. In particular, the paper is focused on the experimental validation of the main features of Multicarrier PWM taken into account by varying the modulation index and the switching frequency.