Analysis of Multi-Level Inverters for Electri...

Analysis of Multi-Level Inverters for Electric Vehicles

Author Name : Narendra Bavisetti, Jajula Suresh, Victor Babu Penumala, D. Sai Prasanthi

ABSTRACT

The efficient and compact design of multilevel inverters (MLI) motivates in various applications such as solar PV and electric vehicles (EV). This paper proposes a 53-Level multilevel inverter topology based on a switched capacitor (SC) approach. The number of levels of MLI is designed based on the cascade connection of the number of SC cells. The proposed structure is straightforward and easy to implement for the higher levels. As the number of active switches is less, the driver circuits are reduced. This reduces the device count, cost, and size of the MLI. The solar panels, along with a perturb and observe (P&O) algorithm, provide a stable DC voltage and is boosted over the DC link voltage using a single input and multi-output converter (SIMO). The proposed inverters are tested experimentally under dynamic load variations with sudden load disturbances. This represents an electric vehicle moving on various road conditions. A detailed comparison is made in terms of switches count, gate driver boards, sources count, the number of diodes and capacitor count, and component count factor. For 53-level MLI, simulation results are verified with experimental results, and total harmonic distortion (THD) is observed to be the same and is lower than         5% which is under IEEE standards and verified experimentally under dynamic load variations, whereas the simulations are done in MATLAB/Simulink.

Index Terms: Multilevel inverter, photovoltaic (PV) system, maximum power point tracking (MPPT), electric vehicles (EV), total harmonic distortion (THD)