Hardware design of a 1.7 kV SiC MOSFET based MMC for medium voltage motor drives

This paper presents the hardware design of a 7 kV dc bus, 1 MVA, 0-1,000 Hz, 1.7 kV SiC MOSFET based medium voltage variable speed drive (MVVSD)
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. The system is based on a 7-level three-phase modular multilevel converter (MMC). The full in-depth design, development, and testing of this prototype are provided, including MMC submodule development, arm inductor design, control hardware realization, system integration and thermal analysis. Finally, experimental results demonstrate the excellent performance of the 1.7 kV SiC MOSFET based submodule and the 1 MW, 7 kV MVVSD as a unity in various operation modes.