Conventional Space-Vector Modulation Techniques Versus the Single-Phase Modulator for Multilevel Converters

Abstract

Space-vector modulation (SVM) is a well-suited technique to be applied to multilevel converters and is an important research focus in the last 25 years. Recently, a single-phase multilevel modulator has been introduced, showing its conceptual simplicity and its very low computational cost. In this paper, some of the most conventional multilevel SVM techniques have been chosen to compare their results with those obtained with single-phase multilevel modulators. The obtained results demonstrate that the single-phase multilevel modulators applied to each phase are equivalent with the chosen well-known multilevel SVM techniques. In this way, single-phase multilevel modulators can be applied to a converter with any number of levels and phases, avoiding the use of conceptually and mathematically complex SVM strategies. Analytical calculations and experimental results are shown, validating the proposed concepts.