Design and Comparison of Cascaded H-Bridge, Modular Multilevel Converter, and 5-L Active Neutral Point Clamped Topologies for Motor Drive Applications

This paper presents the design procedure and comparison of converters currently used in medium-voltage high-power motor drive applications. For this purpose, the cascaded H-bridge (CHB), modular multilevel converter (MMC), and five-level active neutral point clamped (5-L ANPC) topologies are targeted. The design is performed using 1.7-kV insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) for CHB and MMC converters, and utilizing 3.3- and 4.5-kV IGBTs for 5-L ANPC topology as normally done in industry. The comparison is done between the designed converter topologies at three different voltage levels (4.16, 6.9, and 13.8 kV, with only the first two voltage levels in case of the 5-L ANPC) and two different power levels (3 and 5 MVA), in order to elucidate the dependence of different parameters on voltage and power rating. The comparison is done from several points of view such as efficiency, capacitive energy storage, semiconductor utilization, parts count (for measure of reliability), and power density.