Design and implementation of a three level diode clamped inverter for more electric aircraft applications using hardware in the loop simulator

Aircraft technology has been witnessing a complete revamp in the past two decades. The traditional mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic systems in civil aircrafts are beginning to be replaced by lighter and compact electrical systems. Inverters are indispensable in an aircraft electric system and are employed for conversion of DC power to AC. Multilevel inverters reduces the harmonic content in the output waveform thereby reducing the size of the filter components. This is a major advantage as weight plays a significant role in aircraft design. In this paper, a three phase three level diode clamped inverter operating at 400Hz frequency has been designed and developed, having lesser distortion factor. The Model is developed in Matlab/Simulink environment and the control logic for the inverter power switches is developed by using Hardware-in-the loop (HIL) platform. The three phase three level diode clamped inverter prototype results were verified and validated with aircraft AC voltage specifications.