Experimental study of a SiC MOSFET based single phase inverter in UPS applications

Single phase uninterruptible power supply (UPS) has been widely used for a variety of critical load to overcome the disruption in utility power supplies. Wide band gap (WBG) power semiconductor devices, such as Silicon Carbide (SiC) finds its application in UPS systems due to its higher switching frequency, lower losses, and higher power density compared to Si devices. In this paper, a full SiC-based 2-level single phase inverter was simulated and tested for single phase UPS applications. The performance is compared with a Si-based 3-level single phase inverter. The simulation and experimental results show that SiC-based 2-level inverter can achieve better efficiency than Si-based 3-level inverter with reduced component counts and system complexity. The impact of switching frequency and filter inductor size on the SiC inverter efficiency is also investigated.