High efficiency three-phase soft-switching inverter for electric vehicle drives

This paper presents a high efficiency three-phase soft-switching inverter for electric vehicle drives application. A 12 kW three-phase soft-switching inverter using CoolMOS as the main device and IGBT as the auxiliary device has been designed and fabricated. The electric vehicle drive test system has been assembled with soft-switching inverter, induction motor and dynamometer. The soft-switching inverter has been tested with closed-loop torque direction control under speed reversal conditions. The measured efficiency of the inverter in a wide load range is above 98.5%. The calorimeter test at 12 kW shows 98.8% efficiency.