Performance comparison study of two and three-level inverter for electric vehicle application

A performance comparison study for a two- and three-level inverter based permanent magnet synchronous machine (PMSM) drive has been carried out. A novel space-vector pulse width modulation (SV-PWM) based DC-link voltage balancing algorithm is also presented, to drive the machine from three-level inverter. The proposed algorithm keeps the two DC-link capacitor voltages at their specific voltage tolerance level. Two-level inverter is also feed by space-vector based pulse width modulation (SV-PWM) technique. Total voltage harmonic distortion (THD), capacitor RMS current ripple (Icap), Conduction and switching losses for IGBT and diodes, torque ripple (Trpp) and DC-link capacitor voltage ripple (Vcaprip) are considered to perform the comparison study for both the inverters. Switching losses are calculated in PLECS environment using data sheet parameters from Infineon and control logics are developed in MATLAB/ Sim power system (SPS) tool box. For this study a 110.0 kW surface-PMSM is considered, which are mainly used for electric vehicle propulsion applications. A scaled down prototype is built in laboratory for both the inverters and tested with a 6.0 kW surface-PMSM. Both the simulation and experimental results show satisfactory performance of the proposed system.