Discontinuous PWM for low switching losses in indirect matrix converter drives

This paper proposes a discontinuous pulse width modulation (DPWM) method for an indirect matrix converter (IMC) driving induction motor (IM) in order to reduce switching losses. The IMC has advantages that long lifetime and reduced volume depending on the lack of capacitors. However, the IMC has many electric switching devices because it is composed of two stages such as a rectifier stage and an inverter stage for AC/AC power conversion. Therefore, the IMC has higher switching losses according to a number of switching devices consequently. The other topologies are researched for reduction in the number of switching devices in the rectifier stage such as sparse matrix converter. On the contrary, in this paper, the DPWM method is used to reduce the switching losses of the inverter stage. The effectiveness of the proposed method for reduce the switching losses of the inverter stage is verified by simulation results.