A rugged soft commutated PWM inverter for AC drives

A novel DC-DC power converter for variable-speed AC power drives using the zero-voltage switching technique is described. This converter combines the advantages of soft commutated inverters and those of conventional pulsewidth modulated (PWM) inverters. In the proposed scheme, the soft commutation reduces the constraints on the switches, and the PWM enables simple and efficient regulation of the power flow. Furthermore, the zero-voltage switching technique makes operation safe, and the switching of bipolar transistors at 20 kHz is easily achieved without compromising the efficiency of the system.<
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