A Multilevel Inverter for Instantaneous Voltage Balancing of Single Sourced Stacked DC-Link Capacitors for an Induction Motor Load

This article proposes a novel nine-level multilevel inverter topology with an instantaneous voltage balancing scheme of stacked dc-link capacitors for an induction motor (IM) drive application. Three neutral points (NPs, terminal joints of four series-connected capacitors) across a single dc-link are balanced instantaneously (within a sampling interval) by ensuring zero current at the NPs. The proper selection of pole voltage from the redundancies provides zero current at any NP during the pulsewidth modulation operation under a steady-state and transient operation. A five-level stacked inverter and three cascaded hybrid-bridge (CHB) inverter cells are used in each phase. Along with the balancing of dc-link capacitors, CHB capacitors’ voltage balancing is also achieved using the pole voltage redundancies at all modulation indexes for all power factor and load. It is also possible to increase more number of levels using more low-voltage switches, and a generalized form of the topology is presented. The concept is validated using a laboratory-developed nine-level inverter with a three-phase IM load, operated under “V/f” control. The detailed experimental results for the steady and transient condition, simulation studies for switching loss, and harmonic content in the phase voltage are also presented.