Three-Phase Dual-Buck Inverter With Unified Pulsewidth Modulation

TLDR: The proposed three-phase dual-buck inverter does not need dead time, and thus avoids the shoot-through problems of traditional VSIs, and leads to greatly enhanced system reliability.

Abstract: 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.