A Software-Defined Stacked Multilevel Motor Drive Inverter with Linear Component Scaling

This research proposes a software-defined multilevel inverter topology for use in motor drives. Each cell consists of elementary power conversion modules that consist of power FETs, filtering, and local control. They are aggregated by software to form a multilevel topology demonstrating a simplified construction of a larger converter from component cells. A 5-Cell converter is simulated to validate the design, and the resulting voltage and current waveforms are shown. Dynamic modelling of the converter is also discussed. [1] demonstrated that high-performance module-level controls enable stacked converters and mitigate resonances. The simulated 2.5 kW, 5-level motor drive has 300 Hz torque control bandwidth. The modular stacked design provides dynamic voltage sharing. This allows commonly available fast, low on resistance switches to be used.