A Flexible Hardware Platform for Applications in Power Electronics Research and Education

Abstract

This work presents the design and development of a three-phase multilevel hardware platform for applications in power electronics. The emphasis of the proposed converter is in its flexibility to allow rapid set-ups of different experiments typically required in power electronics teaching and research. The proposed converter uses a cascaded H-bridge topology whereby multilevel operation with up to 9 voltage levels can be obtained. The selected power stage topology as well as the control, drivers and sensors boards designs, enable the platform to operate in multiple configurations, namely as inverter, controlled rectifier or active power filter, for one, two or three-phase systems.