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Three-level neutral point-clamped (NPC) traction inverter drive for electric vehicles

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Three-level neutral point-clamped (NPC) traction inverter drive for electric vehicles

Choudhury, Abhijit (2015) Three-level neutral point-clamped (NPC) traction inverter drive for electric vehicles. PhD thesis, Concordia University.

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Abstract

The motivation of this project was to develop a three level neutral point clamped (NPC) traction inverter for a permanent magnet synchronous machine drive. The three-level inverter helps to reduce the total inverter losses at higher switching frequencies, compared to a two-level inverter for electric vehicle applications. The three-level inverter has also more power switches compared to the two-level inverter. This helps to reduce the voltage stress across the switches and the machine winding. In addition, it also allows an increase in the DC-link voltage, which in turn helps to reduce the DC-link current, phase conductor size and the associated losses. Moreover, at higher DC-bus voltages the power switches will have lower thermal stress when compared to the 2-level. However, the NPC inverter topologies have an inherent problem of DC-link voltage balancing.
In the initial part of this thesis, a novel space vector based DC-link voltage balancing strategy is proposed. This strategy can keep the two DC-link capacitor voltages balanced during transient changes in both speed and torque. The performance of the three-level inverter system is then compared with a two-level inverter based drive to validate its performance improvement. The results showed a significant reduction in total voltage and current harmonic distortions, reduced total inverter losses (by 2/3rd) and was even was able to keep the neutral point fluctuation low at all operating load power factor conditions.
The second motivation of this thesis was to reduce the computational time in the real-time implementation of the control logic. For this purpose, a modified carrier and hybrid-carrier based PWM strategy was proposed, which also kept the DC-link capacitor voltages balanced. The modified carrier based strategy was able to reduce the switching losses compared to the conventional strategies, while the hybrid-carrier based strategy kept the advantages of both carrier and the space vector techniques.
Finally, a performance comparison study was carried out to compare the total harmonic distortion, switching loss distribution, and total inverter loss of all the four proposed strategies.

Divisions:Concordia University > Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science > Electrical and Computer Engineering
Item Type:Thesis (PhD)
Authors:Choudhury, Abhijit
Institution:Concordia University
Degree Name:Ph. D.
Program:Electrical and Computer Engineering
Date:1 April 2015
Thesis Supervisor(s):Pillay, Pragasen and Williamson, Sheldon S.
Keywords:Three-level inverter, Neutral point clamped, NPC, Permanent magnet machine, space vector modulation
ID Code:979758
Deposited By: ABHIJIT CHOUDHURY
Deposited On:16 Jul 2015 14:40
Last Modified:18 Jan 2018 17:49
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