Deadtime Impact on the small-signal output impedance of Single-Phase Power Electronic Converters

The deadtime is an important factor in the design of power-electronic converters in order to prevent shoot-through faults. The deadtime may also cause a voltage error and an undesired damping effect which, in turn, affect the converter stability. As most effects caused by the deadtime are highly nonlinear, conventional modeling techniques to analyze these effects cannot be straightforwardly applied. This paper proposes a novel frequency-domain approach to model the damping effect caused by the deadtime in single-phase half-bridge inverters. Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulations and laboratory measurements are presented and used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.