A research paper from the School of Engineering, Bangalore was recently published in Applied Mechanics and Materials, an international open-access journal from Switzerland.
Rashmi M. R., Associate Professor, Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering and Anu B., MTech student of Power Electronics co-authored this paper titled Cascading of Diode Clamped Multilevel Inverter Boosters for High Voltage Applications.
The paper discussed Cascaded Multilevel Inverters, Direct Current (DC) to Alternating Current (AC) Conversion, Pulse Width Modulation and DC boost converts among other topics.
The co-authors shared some details of the research performed.
“Nonconventional energy sources are playing an important role in meeting current energy demands. However these sources cannot provide high voltage power. For power conditioning and voltage amplification, solid state power converters are needed. One approach that allows us to obtain a high voltage is to use a cascaded multilevel inverter.”
“Cascaded multilevel inverters are powerful electronic devices built to synthesize a desired AC voltage from several levels of DC voltages. AC is widely used for household and business purposes.”
“But cascaded multilevel inverters require separate DC sources and they cannot be used for regenerative applications. Our configuration overcomes this limitation, through a diode clamped multilevel inverter.”
The co-authors presented three different configurations in the paper. The conditioned DC voltage from photovoltaic cells or fuel cells or batteries was boosted and inverted by means of multistage multilevel inverters. From the simulation results of the three configurations, the topology that was found to be the best was implemented.
“We developed a prototype to boost 40 Volt input DC to 100 Volt AC and the experimental results for the same were presented,” the researchers shared.
“The proposed design was a combination of inverters and boosters. A quasi sinusoidal output could be obtained using multilevel inverter, where in connecting the edges of several levels in output gives approximately a sine output. Three-level diode clamped multilevel inverter output was boosted using rectifier and boost converter and this output was fed to five-level diode clamped multilevel inverter,” the duo added.
“This configuration offered less total harmonic distortion and provided an approximately sine boosted output voltage.”
The researchers performed the experiments over a period of nine months. “We are happy that our efforts to design and develop the prototype have yielded good results,” they shared.
June 23, 2013
School of Engineering, Bangalore
