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A novel medium voltage five-level converter with minimized volume

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Abstract

In applications such as ship propulsion and off-shore wind power generation, it is important to minimize the volume of medium voltage power converters. To make this possible, a novel five-level converter topology is proposed in this paper. This converter is realized by connecting two half-bridge (HB) cells with a three-level neutral point clamped (3L-NPC) unit. In each HB cell, the switches are directly clamped to DC side capacitors where the larger volume high-voltage flying capacitors are avoided. By adopting the 3L-NPC unit, the volume of the proposed converter is further reduced. A comprehensive comparison result shows that the volume of the proposed converter is more than 7% less than existing five-level converters. The operation principle and modulation method of this converter are also introduced. Based on the phase-shift pulse width modulation (PS-PWM) method, the capacitor voltages of the proposed converter can be self-balanced. Simulation and experiment results are shown to verify the performance of this converter and the validity of the theoretical analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electrical Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China

    Zhifeng Deng, Jinjun Liu & Sixing Du

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  1. Zhifeng Deng
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  2. Jinjun Liu
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  3. Sixing Du
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Correspondence to Zhifeng Deng.

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Deng, Z., Liu, J. & Du, S. A novel medium voltage five-level converter with minimized volume. J. Power Electron. 22, 1676–1686 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43236-022-00481-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43236-022-00481-3

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