A New Modulation Technique to Control the Switching Losses for Single Phase Three-Level Active-Neutral-Point-Clamped-Inverters

Inhalt:
The lifetime of power semiconductor devices significantly depends on the thermal stress they are exposed to. In three-level active-neutral-pointclamped (ANPC) inverters the power losses – and with those the junction temperatures – are very unbalanced using conventional modulation techniques. In this paper a new modulation technique is proposed to spread the power losses across the semiconductor devices. This new modulation technique is a hybridization of the two mainly used pulse-width-modulation (PWM) techniques for ANPC-inverters. Compared with the commonly used PWM techniques the thermal stress the semiconductor devices are exposed to decreases.