Analysis of Control Strategies for Diode Clamped Multilevel Inverter

This paper presents the comparison of various Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) strategies for the three phase Diode Clamped Multi Level Inverter (DCMLI). The main contribution of this paper is the proposal of new modulation schemes with Variable Amplitude (VA) and various new schemes adopting the constant switching frequency and also variable switching frequency multicarrier control freedom degree combination concepts are developed and simulated for the chosen three phase DCMLI. The three phase DCMLI, is controlled in this paper with Sinusoidal PWM (SPWM) reference along with triangular carriers and analysis is made among both without carrier overlapping and with Carrier Overlapping (CO) techniques to choose the better strategy by performing simulation using MATLAB-SIMULINK. The variation of Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) and fundamental RMS output voltage is observed for various modulation indices. It is observed that among the various equal amplitude PWM strategies, COPWM-C provides less THD and higher RMS voltage. It is recognized that among the various variable amplitude PWM strategies, VACOPWM-C provides less THD and VACOPWM-B provides higher RMS voltage. By comparing the equal amplitude PWM strategies with the variable amplitude PWM strategies it is inferred that VACOPWM-C provides less THD and VACOPWM-B provides higher RMS voltage. It is also inferred that carrier overlapping techniques provides better results compared to the without carrier overlapping techniques.