Title: Cascaded H-bridge inverter motor drives for hybrid electric vehicle applications

Authors: P. Renuga; T. Prathiba

Addresses: Electrical Engineering Department, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, Tamilnadu, 625015, India. ' Electrical Engineering Department, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, Tamilnadu, 625015, India

Abstract: This paper presents the asymmetric cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter for electric vehicles (EV) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) applications. Currently available power inverter systems for HEVs use a DC-DC boost converter to boost the battery voltage for a traditional three-phase inverter. The present HEV drive inverters have low power density, are expensive, and have low efficiency because they need a bulky inductor. Asymmetric cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter design for EV and HEV applications without the use of inductors to output a boosted AC voltage is proposed in this paper. Traditionally, each H-bridge needs a DC power supply having equal values of DC power sources. The proposed design uses the asymmetric cascaded multilevel inverter using non-equal DC power sources based on specified ratios. A fundamental switching scheme is used to do modulation control and to produce a seven-level phase voltage.

Keywords: cascaded H-bridge; CHB; multilevel inverters; fundamental frequency switching; asymmetric inverter design; unequal DC sources; hybrid electric vehicles; HEVs; battery voltage; modulation control.

DOI: 10.1504/IJEHV.2012.050493

International Journal of Electric and Hybrid Vehicles, 2012 Vol.4 No.3, pp.217 - 227

Received: 01 May 2012
Accepted: 21 May 2012

Published online: 15 Apr 2015 *

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