Design and Benchmark of Passive and Active Inductors for a 7.5 kW Motor Drive

Volume, weight, and cost are considered as the drawbacks of the passive LC filters. Recently, activation of passive inductor concept has been proposed to break these limits, which emulates the impedance of passive inductor by using power semiconductor circuits. To explore the benefits of this new concept in motor drive applications, this paper studies the reliability-oriented design of the active inductor for a 7.5 kW commercial motor drive product, and benchmarks the performance of active inductors and passive inductors in terms of volume, weight, and cost. Prototypes are manufactured to verify the accuracy of the modeling results, which proves that the volume, weight, and cost of an active inductor for a 7.5 kW motor drive are 90.5%, 66.7% and 91.2% of the passive inductor, respectively.