Induction Motor Drives Fed by an NPC Inverter with Unbalanced DC-Link

Neutral Point Clamped (NPC) converters with n levels are traditionally controlled in such a way that the DC-link capacitors operate at 1/(n−1) of the total DC-link voltage level. The voltage level across the DC-link capacitors has to be properly regulated by the capacitor unbalance control to contain the harmonic distortion of the converter output voltages. State-of-the-art modulation techniques address the problem of the DC-link voltage regulation for NPC inverters. However, they highly show reduced performance when unbalanced DC-link voltages are considered. In this paper, a novel Space Vector Modulation (SVM) is proposed for NPC converters with an unbalanced DC-link. At every modulation interval, the technique defines the optimal switching pattern by considering the actual unbalanced DC-link conditions. The proposed modulation allows improving the harmonic content of the NPC converter output voltage with respect to a traditional ML-SVM, when the same operating conditions are considered. As an extension, the proposed modulation technique will guarantee the same output voltage quality of a traditional ML-SVM with unbalanced DC-link, while improving the conversion efficiency thanks to a reduction of switching frequency.