Author(s)

A Bellini, S Bifaretti & S Costantini

Abstract

The rapid development of power semiconductors makes more and more interesting the employment of High Voltage IGBTs on the inverters used in high-speed traction drives. The maximum voltage tolerated by actual IGBTs doesn't allow the employment of standard two level Voltage Source Inverters; so, to reduce the maximum drop voltage on its switches devices, a Neutral Point Clamped (NPC) inverter must be used. The paper proposes a suitable extension to NPC inverters of a hysteresis modulation technique, previously developed for standard inverters, which can easily be implemented on a Programmable Logic Device. Finally, simulation results, obtained in Matlab environment using realistic parameters, and an effective PLD implementation are presented.

Keywords