Hybrid cascaded H-bridges multilevel motor drive control for electric vehicles

This paper presents a hybrid cascaded H-bridge multilevel motor drive control scheme for electric/hybrid electric vehicles where each phase of a three-phase cascaded multilevel converter can be implemented using only a single DC source and capacitors for the other DC sources. Traditionally, each phase of a three-phase cascaded multilevel converter requires n DC sources for 2n + 1 output voltage levels. In this paper, a scheme is proposed that allows the use of a single DC source as the first DC source with the remaining n - 1 DC sources being capacitors. It is shown that a simple 7-level equal step output voltage switching control can simultaneously maintain the balance of DC voltage levels of the capacitors, eliminate specified low order non-triplen harmonics, and produce a nearly sinusoidal three-phase output voltage. This scheme therefore provides the capability to produce higher voltages at higher speeds (where they are needed) with a low switching frequency method for motor drive application, which has inherent low switching losses and high conversion efficiency. This control scheme especially fits fuel cell electric vehicle motor drive applications and hybrid electric vehicle motor drive applications.