Discontinuous interleaving of parallel inverters for efficiency improvement

Interleaved switching of parallel inverters has previously been proposed for efficiency/size improvements of grid connected three-phase inverters. This paper proposes a novel interleaving method which practically eliminates insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) turn-on losses and drastically reduces diode reverse recovery losses. The reduction in switching losses are obtained by interleaving two parallel inverter branches so that only one branch conducts the load current at a time. By placing saturable inductors between the parallel branches, soft switching may be obtained, and thereby overall power module losses are reduced. The modulation strategy is suited for converters with doubly fed induction generators (DFIG) for wind turbines, but are not limited hereto. Improvement of switching performance are measured and operational efficiency improvements are calculated and verified in an operating inverter.