Investigation and Comparative Analysis of Advanced PWM Techniques for Three-Phase Three-Level NPC-MLI Drives

The Multilevel inverter topologies (MLIs) are increasingly being used, which is the preferred choice in many industrial Medium-voltage (MV) applications. The inherent low switching frequency in medium voltage neutral point clamped MLI (NPC-MLI) fed industrial drives represent the power quality issues and filter-design challenges. In this paper, two multilevel pulse width modulation (PWM) methods; multi-carrier sine PWM (MCSPWM) and space vector PWM (SVPWM) has been considered for NPC-MLI. Both the methods are compared and analyzed based on different constraints such as voltage profile, total harmonic distortion (THD), common mode voltage (CMV) and neutral point fluctuation (NPF). The results convey that the SVPWM method is superior when compared with the MCSPWM algorithms. Analytical and simulation results achieved by using the MATLAB/Simulink for control systems are experimentally verified using FPGA-SPARTAN – III generation – 3AN –XC3S400 with a 2KW NPC-MLI fed adjustable speed – drive system.