Cascaded Active Neutral Point Clamped and Flying Capacitor Inverter Topology for Induction Motor Drives Applications

This paper proposes a novel multilevel architecture using active neutral point clamped inverter cascaded with a flying capacitor inverter to form a multilevel inverter topology with higher number of voltage levels for induction motor drives. All the capacitors in the topology can be balanced irrespective of any modulation index or power factor. This topology can be generalized for higher number of voltage levels. The front end DC sources required are of very low value and it can be further halved when using a reconfigured six phase induction machine for higher power. The low value DC sources can be stacked battery cells, hence the topology can find extensive applications in electric vehicles. Detailed experimental results are shown for the steady state and transient operations of the inverter. The proposed topology will be a viable scheme for high power applications.