Evaluating the capacity of power and energy balance for cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter using different PWM techniques

Among the different multilevel topologies for inverters, cascaded H-bridge multilevel topology has been a good solution for high-power medium-voltage applications because of its modularity structure, voltage balancing, separated DC sources, harmonics reduction, reliability and lower stresses on switching devices. The most widely used pulse width modulation (PWM) techniques for cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter are known as phase shifted and level shifted. This study presents a comparison of power and energy distribution (inter-phase and inter-bridge power and energy) of three-phase cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter for the phase-shifted and the level-shifted carrier PWM (phase disposition). A detailed comparison of different PWM techniques with reference to total harmonic distortion in the output voltages, both cases using a filter and without filter are presented also in this study. Simulation for 11-level cascaded H-bridge inverter is carried out in MATLAB/SIMULINK and simulation results are presented.

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