Carrier-Based PWM Methods With Common-Mode Voltage Reduction for Five-Phase Coupled Inductor Inverter

Carrier-based pulsewidth-modulation (CBPWM) techniques are popular due to their simplicity, and have been widely researched for various three-phase inverter configurations. In this paper, two CBPWM techniques are proposed to reduce the common-mode (CM) voltage generated by the five-phase inverter. The five-phase inverters have more flexibility in reducing the CM voltage than their three-phase counterparts because they have more phase legs, hence finer control over the star-point voltage of the load. Two methods are proposed for the conventional two-level five-phase inverter to reduce the CM voltage; one utilizing adjacent modulating waveforms and the other utilizing nonadjacent modulating waveforms. The coupled inductor inverter (CII) uses coupled inductors to generate multilevel outputs. As the volt-second balance must be maintained across each coupled inductor, direct application of the proposed methods on the CII inverter will result in overcurrents in the coupled inductors. Hence, the proposed methods are further improved to ensure the volt-second integral over each switching period is zero. Moreover, the two proposed methods are designed to reduce switching events and prevent unexpected states occurring during the switching transitions. The performance and the switching strategy of both methods are verified by both simulations and experiments on a prototype of five-phase CII.