A Five-Level Boost NPC Inverter for Electric Vehicle

This paper proposes a five-level boost Neutral Point Clamped (NPC) inverter feeding an induction motor drive for an electric vehicle. Two partly rated isolated DC-DC converters are implemented to maintain the voltage at the DC-bus of the inverter constant irrespective of the variation in battery terminal voltage. Since the DC-DC converters are only partly rated, the size and loss associated with the converters will be small as compared to other schemes where total DC bus is boosted. Based on simulation study, a relative study regarding semiconductor losses is presented. Results obtained from both simulation studies as well as experimental study validate the performance of the proposed scheme.