Multilevel inverters for electric vehicle applications

This paper presents multilevel inverters as an application for all-electric vehicle (EV) and hybrid-electric vehicle (HEV) motor drives. Diode-clamped inverters and cascaded H-bridge inverters: (1) can generate near-sinusoidal voltages with only fundamental frequency switching; (2) have almost no electromagnetic interference (EMI) and common-mode voltage; and (3) make an EV more accessible/safer and open wiring possible for most of an EV´s power system. This paper explores the benefits and discusses control schemes of the cascade inverter for use as an EV motor drive or a parallel HEV drive and the diode-clamped inverter as a series HEV motor drive. Analytical, simulated, and experimental results show the superiority of these multilevel inverters for this new niche