A New Approach to Input Filter Design for Regenerative Cascaded H-Bridge Drives

The diode-front-end (DFE) cascaded H-bridge (CHB) inverter has prevailed in the nonregenerative industry drive domain for high power medium voltage applications due to its modularity, scalability, and fault-tolerant capability. The regenerative version of the CHB drives is made possible by adding the extra active-front-end (AFE) rectifier in each power cell, such as a three-phase Pulse width modulation (PWM) rectifier. However, AFE introduces the switching harmonics which requires to be attenuated by designing a grid interfaced filter to comply with the harmonic standard IEEE 519-2014. High-order filters like LCL filters are not preferred due to complex inherent resonances in a multiparallel AFE system. A large number of capacitive components in the system rouse multiple resonances, which decreases system reliability and modularity. This article proposes an active filtering strategy based on the optimal asymmetric carrier-shifting method for regenerative CHB drives with only L filters. The required filter size is reduced significantly while complying with IEEE 519-2014 standard and thus improves the overall size, cost, and efficiency. The proposed filtering strategy is validated experimentally using a seven-level regenerative CHB drive.

Automated summary

The diode-front-end cascaded H-bridge inverter has significant applications in the nonregenerative industry drive domain. However, the additional active-front-end rectifier introduces switching harmonics, which require grid interfaced filters to comply with harmonic standards. This article proposes an active filtering strategy based on an optimal asymmetric carrier-shifting method to reduce the required filter size and improve overall size, cost, and efficiency.