Hardware realization and analysis of a seven level reduced switch inverter with space vector modulation technique

Multilevel inverters (MLI) are employed to enhance the performance of the motor drives, in which the performance improvement is depends on the modulation scheme and the number of power switches and associated components of MLI. Various limitations of conventional sinusoidal pulse width modulation (SPWM) technique result in drives with lesser efficiency. Space Vector Pulse Width Modulation (SVPWM) schemes are now becoming common in inverter systems due to its advantages over other techniques such as better utilization of input voltage and lesser total harmonic distortion especially from the drive system perspective. The disadvantage being the complex computations which increases with the number of voltages levels in MLI. This paper investigates and compares the performance of a seven level inverter with conventional SPWM and a new multilevel multiphase SVPWM algorithm. The model is simulated in MATLAB/simulink and a low power prototype of the model is implemented in the laboratory to verify the simulation results.