An improved carrierwave-based SVPWM method using phase voltage redundancies for generalized cascaded multilevel inverter topology

Carrierwave-based space vector pulse width modulation (SVPWM), which is considered as a highly simple and efficient PWM technology, can be also used in multilevel inverters. The method was originally designed for the two-level inverter and developed to the diode-clamped multilevel inverter structure. However it may be noted that it also causes bad switch utilization in cascaded multilevel inverters. This paper introduces an improved carrierwave-based SVPWM scheme, which is fully compliant with cascaded inverter topologies because it can achieve the optimized switch utilization using phase voltage redundancies while having the advantages of the conventional carrierwave-based SVPWM. Using experimental results, the superior performance of a new PWM method is shown.