High Power Synchronous Machine fed by a Cascaded Regenerative Inverter

Cascaded multilevel inverters provide high quality voltages at the load, reducing pulsating torques and common mode voltage. Also, the input current has a low harmonic content due to the multipulse transformer, providing a nearly sinusoidal current. This paper introduces a topology with an active-front-end rectifier at the input of each cell to achieve four quadrant operation. Thus, the main features of the drive are: sinusoidal input and output currents, unity power factor and regeneration of power to the power supply. This work also studies the complete drive behavior of a synchronous machine using this topology.