Switching technique comparison for multi-phase inverters

Vast development in power electronics since the last decade has lead to applications of electric drives with phase number greater than three especially in locomotive, naval, aerospace, and electrical vehicles industry. Multi-phase electric drives offer great number of advantages compared to three-phase electric drives but multi-phase drives produce unwanted low-order harmonics that can lead to losses. This paper presents three switching techniques using space vector modulation for two-level five-phase voltage source inverter (VSI). The performance of these switching techniques is verified using MATLAB/Simulink software. Harmonic contents and output phase voltage are observed for every switching technique. It was found that by using four active vectors with balanced state duration ratio of medium and large vectors, five-phase VSI able to produce output voltage close to sinusoidal waveform and simultaneously eliminate unwanted harmonics.