Novel carrier-based hybrid pulse width modulation method for cascaded capacitor-clamp multilevel inverter

Abstract

This study presents a new carrier-based hybrid pulse width modulation (PWM) Method for the cascaded capacitor-clamp multilevel inverter (CCCMLI), which combines the benefits of a new alternative level-shifted carrier PWM and a phase-shifted carrier PWM. For modulating the CCCMLI, the phase disposition sub-harmonic PWM was first proposed, but does not show good performances in an even load sharing between inverter cells connected in series, flying-capacitor voltage balancing and output waveform quality. On the other hand, a proposed PWM method enables to achieve a balanced load sharing between cascaded cells even at low amplitude modulation indices as well as the excellent voltage balancing control of the flying-capacitors with a much smaller voltage ripple and the good harmonic characteristics in output waveforms. The proposed modulation is verified through both simulation and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) based experimental results.