A New Active Front-End Control for Regenerative Cascaded H-Bridge Motor Drives With Filter- Less Interfacing Capability

This article proposes a new active-front-end (AFE) control method for regenerative cascaded H-bridge (CHB) motor drives. Conventional CHB converters have dominated the market for the medium-voltage industrial motor drives. However, conventional CHB converters cannot provide regenerative capability. To enable regeneration; diode-front-ends in power cells are replaced with insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT)-based pulsewidth modulation (PWM) AFEs. Despite the appealing dynamic performance of PWM AFEs, their integration to the CHB converters is not optimal. First, they introduce more semiconductor losses due to the high-frequency switching. Second, they introduce switching harmonics that are not cancelled by phase-shifting transformers. Therefore, they require additional harmonic filtering solutions to comply with grid harmonic standards. To resolve these challenges, this article proposes a new AFE control for regenerative CHB converters based on fundamental frequency switching (FFE) to reduce switching frequency and thus power losses. The operation of FFEs at nominal and sag voltage conditions is presented, in addition to the capability of filter-less interfacing to the transformer. Finally, the performance of the proposed control is validated experimentally on a seven-level regenerative CHB drive.

Automated summary

This article proposes a new active-front-end (AFE) control method for regenerative cascaded H-bridge (CHB) motor drives to solve the regeneration issue. The integration of conventional AFEs to CHB converters is not optimal due to increased semiconductor losses and switching harmonics. To address these challenges, the article suggests a new AFE control based on fundamental frequency switching (FFE) to reduce power losses. The experimentally validated performance of the proposed control on a seven-level regenerative CHB drive is presented.