Performance Investigation of a Traction Electric Drive Under Various Modulation Strategies, DC-link Voltages and Switching Frequencies

The dc-link voltage, switching frequency, and modulation strategy all have significant influence on the power losses and output current total harmonic distortion (THD) of a voltage source inverter (VSI). However, there is not a thorough study of the VSI performance in a traction electric drive considering all these parameters present in literature. This paper aims to investigate how the VSI parameters impact the performance of a VSI in a simulated permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) traction drive under various modulation strategies. Analytical methods used to evaluate inverter performance under various modulation strategies are presented to validate the simulation outcomes. A VSI-fed traction electric drive with a 100 kW PMSM is modelled and simulated at several operating points under various modulation strategies and VSI parameters. The considered modulation strategies are sinusoidal pulse width modulation (SPWM), space vector PWM (SVPWM), discontinuous PWM zero (DPWMO), various DPWM variants such as DPWM1, DPWM2, and DPWM3, with VSI dc-link voltages and switching frequencies ranging from 300 to 420 V and 5 to 15 kHz, respectively.