An Extremely High Efficient Three-Level Active Neutral-Point-Clamped Converter Comprising SiC and Si Hybrid Power Stages

By Qingxin Guan, Chushan Li, Yu Zhang, Shuai Wang, D. Xu, Wuhua Li, Hao Ma. IEEE transactions on power electronics, 2018

202 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Three-level converters typically feature low switching loss and small filter size. In order to realize a high-power-density design for three-level converters, SiC MOSFETs may be selected instead of using Si insulated-gate bipolar transistors. However, all-SiC-MOSFET-based converters suffer from extremely high total cost. In this paper, a SiC MOSFET and Si device hybrid active neutral-point-clamped (ANPC) converter is proposed. It consists of four Si active switches and only two SiC MOSFETs. Thus, it has lower total cost compared to the all-SiC-MOSFET-based ANPC converter. Furthermore, a dedicated modulation scheme is proposed to completely move all the switching events from Si devices to SiC MOSFETs by using redundant switching states. As a result, the switching losses are significantly reduced and extremely high efficiency is achieved. The proposed converter has fully utilized the low-switching-loss advantage of SiC MOSFETs and the low-cost advantage of Si devices, which shows significant superiority in high-end grid-connected inverter and rectifier applications.

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b285ab8fd632b9967a745db997be54af834c80f8