Three-Phase Dual-Buck Inverter With Unified Pulsewidth Modulation

• Published in: IEEE transactions on power electronics Vol. 27; no. 3; pp. 1159 - 1167
• Main Authors: Pengwei Sun, Chuang Liu, Jih-Sheng Lai, Chien-Liang Chen, Kees, Nathan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York, NY IEEE 01.03.2012; Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Aerospace electronics; Applied sciences; Circuit properties; Circuits of signal characteristics conditioning (including delay circuits); Control systems; Controllers; Convertors; Dual-buck inverter; Electric currents; Electric, optical and optoelectronic circuits; Electrical engineering. Electrical power engineering; Electrical machines; Electronic circuits; Electronic equipment and fabrication. Passive components, printed wiring boards, connectics; Electronics; Exact sciences and technology; Inverters; Measurement; MOSFETs; Power electronics, power supplies; Reliability; Space vector pulse width modulation; Switches; Switching loss; three-phase inverter; unified PWM; voltage source inverter; Passive component; MOSFET; Implementation; Power transistor; Discontinuous mode; Real time processing; Inverter; Insulated gate bipolar transistor; Power electronics; Phase reversal; Topology; System reliability; Switching; Phase shifter; unified PWM; Voltage source converter; three-phase inverter; Deadtime; Switching loss; voltage source inverter; Three phase circuit; Active component; Ripple; Pulse duration modulation; Power MOSFET; Dual-buck inverter
• ISSN: 0885-8993; 1941-0107
• DOI: 10.1109/TPEL.2011.2164269

This paper presents a new type of three-phase voltage source inverter (VSI), called three-phase dual-buck inverter. The proposed inverter does not need dead time, and thus avoids the shoot-through problems of traditional VSIs, and leads to greatly enhanced system reliability. Though it is still a hard-switching inverter, the topology allows the use of power MOSFETs as the active devices instead of IGBTs typically employed by traditional hard-switching VSIs. As a result, the inverter has the benefit of lower switching loss, and it can be designed at higher switching frequency to reduce current ripple and the size of passive components. A unified pulsewidth modulation (PWM) is introduced to reduce computational burden in real-time implementation. Different PWM methods were applied to a three-phase dual-buck inverter, including sinusoidal PWM (SPWM), space vector PWM (SVPWM) and discontinuous space vector PWM (DSVPWM). A 2.5 kW prototype of a three-phase dual-buck inverter and its control system has been designed and tested under different dc bus voltage and modulation index conditions to verify the feasibility of the circuit, the effectiveness of the controller, and to compare the features of different PWMs. Efficiency measurement of different PWMs has been conducted, and the inverter sees peak efficiency of 98.8% with DSVPWM.