Reducing common-mode voltage in three-phase sine-triangle PWM with interleaved carriers

Interleaving PWM waveforms is a proven method to reduce ripple in dc-dc converters. The present work explores interleaving for three-phase motor drives. Fourier analysis shows that interleaving the carriers in conventional uniform PWM significantly reduces the common-mode voltage. New DSP hardware supports interleaving directly with changes to just two registers at setup time, so no additional computation time is needed during operation. The common-mode voltage reduction ranges from 36% at full modulation to 67% when idling with zero modulation. Third harmonic injection slightly reduces the advantage (to 26% at full modulation). However, the maximum RMS common-mode voltage is still less than 20% of the bus voltage under all conditions. Low-voltage experimental results support the findings.