Comparative experimental evaluation of soft-switching inverter techniques for electric vehicle drive applications

Three different types of 50 kW soft-switching inverters, a six-switch zero-current transition (ZCT) inverter, auxiliary resonant commutated pole (ARCP) inverter, and a low-cost six-switch ZCT inverter, are designed and built for electric vehicle (EV) applications, and compared with a hard-switching inverter. This paper presents the designs of the inverters, and reports inverters' performance, based on the experimentally obtained data, in terms of efficiency, conducted EMI, and motor terminal voltage overshoot and ringing. Both the general merits and individual features of the soft-switching inverters for EV applications are evaluated, through comparison with a hard-switching inverter performance.