Performance analysis of carrier based PWM technique for three level diode clamped multilevel inverter with different reference signals

Multilevel Inverters (MLI) are used in electrical drives in industries especially for medium/high power applications due to the low total harmonic distortion (THD) contents in voltage waveform and high utilization factor. For control of output voltage several pulse width modulation techniques are used. Carrier based PWM (CBPWM) techniques are quite simple compared to space vector modulation. In this paper diode clamped MLI has been selected and its performance with several conventional CBPWM techniques has been analyzed using MATLAB simulation. The analysis is based on four different reference signals taken with carrier wave. The variation of THD with amplitude modulation index is shown for all CBPWM technique. Gate signal generation for all the CBPWM techniques using TMS320F28335 has also been included in this paper.