Analysis and Small Signal Modeling of Five-Level Series Resonant Inverter

This paper explains the implementation of a small-signal model for a new five-level series resonant inverter structure. The proposed circuit combines the advantages of multilevel inverters and the characteristics of the physical phenomena, resonance. The small-signal model offers the possibility to design a linearized linear time-invariant (LTI) model around an equilibrium point based on the first-order Taylor series. After that, the performance of the proposed five-level series resonant inverter and its small-signal model are evaluated in MATLAB/Simulink environment. Compared with a MATLAB model generated using the system identification toolbox, the developed small-signal model exhibited a good accuracy in frequency and time domains. In addition, a hardware test bench is developed to validate the proposed model. Both simulation and experimental results show that the proposed multilevel resonant inverter is very interesting for high-voltage high-frequency applications. As a perspective, from the results obtained, we suggest the use of small-signal AC analysis for multilevel series resonant inverter modeling. The paper contains rich information on the recently used tools for dynamic systems modeling and analysis of nonlinear processes that can be applied to modeling and analyzing other power electronics inverters.