Si/SiC Hybrid 5-level Active NPC Inverter for Electric Aircraft Propulsion Drive Applications

Medium voltage DC(MVDC)system is considered as a promising technology to improve the efficiency and power density of electric aircraft propulsion(EAP)drives.To adapt to the MVDC voltage level and achieve high drive performance,a five-level active neutral point clamped(5L-ANPC)inverter consisting of three-level ANPC and flying capacitor circuits is investigated,which possesses higher voltage capability,lower output harmonics,as well as mitigated dv/dt and common-mode voltage.To fulfill the requirements of high-speed operation and pursue further enhanced efficiency and power density of the inverter for the next-generation EAP drives,Silicon Carbide(SiC)semiconductor devices are considered for implementing the 5L-ANPC inverter.However,the large commutation loops associated with certain switching states of the inverter lessen the benefits of configuring all the switches as SiC devices.As a result,a hybrid Si/SiC 5L-ANPC inverter is developed with a synchronous optimal pulse(SOP)width modulation strategy for controlling the switches in cell 2 and finite-control-set model predictive controller(FCS-MPC)for those in cell 3 of the inverter.Consequently,in the proposed topology,the SiC devices are merely used for the high-frequency switches in cell 3 and the rest of the low-frequency switches are configured with Si IGBTs.This Si/SiC hybrid ANPC inverter concurrently provides high efficiency and low implementation cost at high-speed operation mode.Simulation and experimental results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed hybrid inverter.

Fast Online Diagnosis of Open-circuit Switching Faults in Flying Capacitor Multilevel Inverters

Flying capacitor multilevel(FCML)inverter is an attractive power converter topology which provides high-quality staircase output voltage waveforms by cascading flying capacitor cells.However,the large number of semiconductor devices utilized in the FCML inverters degrades the hardware reliability,which may constrain such converters from being applied in safety-critical applications.Targeting at open-circuit switching faults,a fast online fault diagnostic method for FCML inverters is presented.Conventional phase-shifted PWM(PSPWM),which can naturally balance the voltage across flying capacitors,is used as the modulation method in this work.Hence,to retain the simplicity feature of the PSPWM,the proposed diagnostic method is developed so that it does not require any voltage measurements of flying capacitors.Only the output AC voltage and current data along with the switching PWM signals from the microcontroller are needed to detect an open-circuit switching fault,and all such sensory data is typically available in the inverter,requiring no additional sensors or hardware for the implementation of this diagnostic method.The detection process takes 5% of the fundamental period of the inverter output signals to diagnose the faulty switch.Simulation and experimental results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed diagnostic method.