Ethiopia Defense University College of Engineering

Electrical Power Engineering Department

Chapter Three
Power Electronics for Power System
DC to AC INVERTERS
 Outline
• Introduction
• Basic Concepts of Switch-Mode Inverters
• Single-Phase Inverters
• Three-phase Inverters
• Effect of Blanking on Output Voltage in PWM
Inverters
• Other Inverter Switching Schemes
• Rectifier Mode of Operation
• Summary
• Problems

3
 Inverters
 DEFINITION: Converts DC to AC power by switching the DC
input voltage (or current) in a pre-determined sequence so as
to generate AC voltage (or current) output.
 TYPICAL APPLICATIONS: Un-interruptible power supply
(UPS), Industrial (induction motor) drives, Renewable energy
interfaces, Traction, HVDC, Adjustable speed drives (ASDs),
static var compensators, active filters, flexible ac transmission
systems (FACTS), and voltage compensators, which are only a
few applications.
 General block diagram is shown below
 Types:-
- by out put phase no. – 1-ph & 3-ph
- by out put wave form – sine wave and square wave
- in put feed – voltage source (VSI) fig.3.a and current source
(CSI) fig.3.b 4
 Principle of inversion
 The basic principle of VSI is shown in fig a and CSI is in
fig.3.23 b
idc iac
+
= Vac
Vdc ~
-
Block Diagram For 0<t< - S1 – ON
-S2 – OFF
 <t<2- S2- ON
-S1-OFF
Switch S can be any of
controlled power switch
depending on power &
switching frequency5
Fig.3.a
 Introduction
• Switch-mode dc-to-ac inverters are used in ac motor drives and uninterruptible ac
power
supplies where the objective is to produce a sinusoidal ac output whose magnitude and
frequency can both be controlled.
• As an example, consider an ac motor drive, shown in Fig. 3-1 in a block diagram form.

50/60Hz

Figure 3-1

• Block diagram of a motor drive where the power flow is unidirectional

6
 Introduction…
• In an ac motor load, the voltage at its terminals is desired to be sinusoidal
and adjustable in its magnitude and frequency. This is accomplished by
means of the switch-mode dc-to-ac inverter of Fig. 3-1, which accepts a dc
voltage as the input and produces the desired ac voltage input.
• To be precise, the switch-mode inverter in Fig. 3-1 is a converter through
which the power flow is reversible.
• However, most of the time the power flow is from the dc side
to the motor on the ac side, requiring an inverter mode of operation.
Therefore, these switch-mode converters are often referred to as switch-
mode inverters.
• To slow down the ac motor in Fig. 3-1, the kinetic energy associated with
the inertia of the motor and its load is recovered and the ac motor acts as a
generator.
• During the so-called braking of the motor, the power flows from the ac side
to the dc side of the switch-mode converter and it operates in a rectifier
mode.

7
 Motor Drive
• In applications where the braking is performed frequently, a better alternative is
regenerative braking where the energy recovered from the motor load inertia is fed
back to the utility grid, as shown in the system of Fig. 3-2.
• This requires that the converter connecting the drive to the utility grid be a two-
quadrant converter with a reversible dc current, which can operate as a rectifier during
the motoring mode of the ac motor and as an inverter during the braking of the motor.
• Such a reversible-current two-quadrant converter can be realized by
two back-to-back connected line-frequency thyristor converters by means of a switch-
mode converter as shown in Fig. 3-2.

Figure 3-2 Switch-mode converters for

motoring and regenerative braking in ac
motor drive.
• Block diagram of a motor drive where the power flow can be bi-directional
8
 Introduction…
• The input to switch-mode inverters will be assumed to be a dc voltage
source, as was assumed in the block diagrams of Fig. 3-1 and 3-2.
• Such inverters are referred to as voltage source inverters (VSIs).
• The other types of inverters, now used only for very high power ac motor
drives, are the current source inverters (CSIs), where the dc input to the
inverter is a dc current source.
• Because of their limited applications, the CSIs are not
discussed in this slide

9
Principle of inversion – cont - ed

Fig.3.23

 Note that in VSI the out put voltage is square wave but current
wave shape depends on load type, where as in CSI the out put current
is square shape and voltage wave form depend on the load types
 VSI is most common used type in inverter and there fore we will
discuss this type of inverter
10
 Voltage Source Inverters (VSIs)
• The VSIs can be further divided into the following three general categories:
1. Pulse-width-modulated inverters.
•In these inverters, the input dc voltage is essentially constant in magnitude, such as in
the circuit of Fig. 3-1, where a diode rectifier is used to rectify the line voltage.
•Therefore, the inverter must control the magnitude and the frequency of the ac output
voltages. This is achieved by PWM of the Inverter switches and hence such inverters
are called PWM inverters.
•There are various schemes to pulse-width modulate the inverter switches in order to
shape the output ac voltages to be as close to a sine wave as possible with a scheme
called the sinusoidal PWM.

2. Square-wave inverters.
•In these inverters, the input dc voltage is controlled in order to control the magnitude
of the output ac voltage, and therefore the inverter has to control only the frequency of
the output voltage.
•The output ac voltage has a waveform similar to a square wave, and hence these
inverters are called square wave Inverters.

11
 Voltage Source Inverters (VSIs)…

3. Single-phase inverters with voltage cancellation.

•In case of inverters with single phase output, it is possible to control the
magnitude and the frequency of the inverter output voltage, even though the
input to the inverter is a constant dc voltage and the inverter switches are not
pulse-width modulated (and hence the output voltage waveshape is like a
square wave).
•Therefore, these inverters combine the characteristics of the previous two
inverters.
•It should be noted that the voltage cancellation technique works only with
single-phase inverters and not with three-phase inverters.

12
 …
• For sinusoidal ac outputs, the magnitude, frequency, and phase should be
controllable.
• According to the type of the load nature, Inverter topologies can be considered
as
1. voltage source inverters (VSIs)
2. current source inverters (CSIs) – used with capacitive load where di/dt spikes
become very high.
NB: VSI structures are the most widely used because they naturally behave as
voltage sources as required by many industrial applications, such as adjustable
speed drives (ASDs), which are the most popular application of inverters;

Voltage source inverter. Current source inverter.

13
BASIC CONCEPTS OF SWITCH-MODE INVERTERS
• a single-phase inverter is shown in block diagram form in Fig. 3-3a, where the
output voltage of the inverter is filtered so that vo can be assumed to be
sinusoidal.
• Since the inverter supplies an inductive load such as an ac motor, io will lag
vo, as shown in Fig. 3-3b.
• The output waveforms of Fig. 3-3b show that during interval l, vo and io are
both positive, whereas during interval 3, vo and io are both negative.
• Therefore, during intervals 1 and 3, the instantaneous power flow po (=voio) is
from the dc side to the ac side, corresponding to an inverter mode of operation.
• In contrast, vo and io are of opposite signs during intervals 2 and 4, and
therefore po flows from the ac side to the dc side of the inverter,
corresponding to a rectifier mode of operation.
• Therefore, the switch-mode inverter of Fig. 3-3a must be capable of operating
in all four quadrants of the io—vo plane, as shown in Fig. 3-3c during each
cycle of the ac output.

14
 Simple square wave inverter.
Single-phase half-bridge VSI.

Single phase Full-Bridge VSI

DC-link Inverters (ASD-appl.)

15
 AC Waveform Generation
(Single phase Full-bridge VSI Inverter)
S1,S2 ON; S3,S4 OFF
S3,S4 ON ; S1,S2 OFF

S2

VDC

16
 AC Waveforms

Harmonics Filtering

17
 Cnd…
• Output of the inverter is “chopped AC voltage with
zero DC component”. It contain harmonics.
• An LC section low-pass filter is normally fitted at
the inverter output to reduce the high frequency
harmonics.
• In some applications such as UPS, “high purity” sine
wave output is required. Good filtering is a must.
• In some applications such as AC motor drive,
filtering is not required.
18
BASIC CONCEPTS OF SWITCH-MODE INVERTERS…

Figure 3-3 Single-phase

switch-mode inverter.

• Four quadrants of operation

19
BASIC CONCEPTS OF SWITCH-MODE INVERTERS…

Figure3-4: One-leg
switch-mode inverter.

• The mid-point shown is fictitious

20
PULSE-WIDTH-MODULATED SWITCHING SCHEME
• A PWM of full-bridge dc—dc converters discussed earlier, there is a control signal
vcontrol (constant or slowly varying in time) was compared with a repetitive switching
frequency triangular waveform in order to generate the switching signals.
• Controlling the switch duty ratios in this way allowed the average dc voltage output to
be controlled.
• In inverter circuits, the PWM is a bit more complex, since as mentioned earlier, we
would like the inverter output to be sinusoidal with magnitude and frequency
controllable.
• In order to produce a sinusoidal output voltage waveform at a desired frequency, a
sinusoidal control signal at the desired frequency is compared with a triangular
waveform, as shown in Fig. 3-5a.
• The frequency of the triangular waveform establishes the inverter switching frequency
and is generally kept constant along with its amplitude

21
 PWM SWITCHING SCHEME…
• When defining terms used with PWM:
• The triangular waveform vtri in Fig. 3-5a is at a switching frequency fs, which
establishes the frequency with which the inverter switches are switched (L is
also called the carrier frequency).
• The control signal is used to modulate the switch duty ratio and has a frequency
fl, which is the desired fundamental frequency of the inverter voltage output (fl
is also called the modulating frequency), recognizing that the inverter output
voltage will not be a perfect sine wave and will contain voltage components at
harmonic frequencies of fl.
• The amplitude modulation ratio ma is defined as

3.1.

• Where, Vcontrol is the peak amplitude of the control signal.

• The amplitude of the triangular signal is generally kept constant.

22
PWM SWITCHING SCHEME…

23
 PWM SWITCHING SCHEME…

Figure 3-5 Pulse-width modulation.

• The frequency modulation ratio my is defined as 3.2.

24
 PWM SWITCHING SCHEME…
• In the inverter of Fig. 3-5b, the switches TA+ and TA- are controlled based on the
comparison of vcontrol and vtri, and the following output voltage results, independent of the
direction of io:

3.3.
Or

• Since the two switches are never off simultaneously, the output voltage VAo fluctuates
between two values (1/2Vd and -1/2Vd).
• Voltage VAO and its fundamental frequency component (dashed curve) are shown in
Fig. 3-5b, which are drawn for mf=15 and ma = 0.8.
• The harmonic spectrum of under the conditions indicated in figs. 3-5a and 3-5b
is shown in Fig. 3-5c, where the normalized harmonic voltages (VAO)h/ 1/2Vd having
significant amplitudes are plotted.
• This plot (for ma<= 1.0) shows three items of importance:

25
Variable Voltage Variable Frequency Capability

• Output voltage frequency

can be varied by “period”
of the square-wave pulse.
• Output voltage amplitude
can be varied by varying
the “magnitude” of the DC
input voltage.
• Very useful:
e.g. variable speed
induction motor drive

26
 Output voltage harmonics/distortion
• Harmonics cause distortion on the output voltage.
• Lower order harmonics (3rd, 5th etc) are very difficult to
filter, due to the filter size and high filter order. They can
cause serious voltage distortion.
• Why need to consider harmonics?
– Sinusoidal waveform quality must match TNB supply.
– “Power Quality” issue.
– Harmonics may cause degradation of equipment.
Equipment need to be “de-rated”.
• Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) is a measure to determine
the “quality” of a given waveform.

27
Total Harmonics Distortion (THD)

28
 Fourier Series
• Study of harmonics requires understanding of wave shapes.
• Fourier Series is a tool to analyse wave shapes.

29
Harmonics of square-wave

30
Cnd…

31
Spectra of square wave
• Spectra (harmonics)
characteristics:
– Harmonic decreases with a factor
of (1/n).
– Even harmonics are absent
– Nearest harmonics is the 3rd. If
fundamental is 50Hz, then
nearest harmonic is 150Hz.
– Due to the small separation
between the fundamental and
harmonics, output low-pass filter
design can be very difficult.
32
Quasi-square wave (QSW)

33
Harmonic control

34
Half-Bridge Inverter
• Also known as the “inverter leg”.
• Basic building block for full bridge,
three phase and higher order inverters.
• G is the “centre point”.
• Both capacitors have the same value.
Thus the DC link is equally “spilt”
into two.
• The top and bottom switch has to be
“complementary”, i.e. If the top switch is
closed (on), the bottom must be off,
and vice-versa.

35
 Shoot through fault and “Dead-time”

• In practical, a dead time as

shown below is required to
avoid “shoot-through”
faults, i.e. short circuit
across the DC rail.
• Dead time creates “low
frequency envelope”. Low
frequency harmonics
emerged.
• This is the main source of
distortion for high-quality
sine wave inverter. 36
 Example

• A full - bridge single phase inverter is fed by

square wave signals. The DC link voltage is
100V and the load is R 10R.
Calculate :
a)the THDv by using the first three non - zero
harmonics.
b)Repeat (a) for quasi - square wave case with
α = 30 degree
37
 Harmonic Spectrum
• 1. The peak amplitude of the fundamental-frequency component (VA0)1 is ma times
1/2Vd. This can be explained by first considering a constant Vcontrol as shown in Fig.
3-6a. This results in an output waveform vAo.
• Regarding the PWM in a full-bridge dc—dc converter, it can be noted that the average
output voltage (or more specifically, the output voltage averaged over one switching
time period Ts = l/fs) VAo depends on the ratio of Vcontrol to for a given Vd:

3.4.

3.6b.
3.4

38
 Harmonic Spectrum…

3.5.
Where

Fig.3.6 39
 Harmonic Spectrum…
3.4 3.5 &

3.6.

3.7.

40
 Harmonic Spectrum…
2. The harmonics in the inverter output voltage waveform appear as sidebands,
centered around the switching frequency and its multiples, that is, around
harmonics mf, 2mf, 3mf, and so on.
•This general patter holds true for all values of ma in the range 0—l.
•For a frequency modulation ratio mf<= 9 (which is always the case, except in
very high power ratings), the harmonic amplitudes are almost independent of mf,
though mf defines the frequencies at which they occur.
•Theoretically, the frequencies at which voltage harmonics occur can be Indicated
as

3.8.

41
 Harmonic Spectrum…
8.1

3.8.
3.4

3.9

3.10

3.1 3.7

8.1

3.5

42
Table 3.1

43
Example 3.1
3.4
3.1

3.1

3.11

44
 Selection of the Switching Frequency
• The selection of the switching frequency and the frequency modulation ratio mf.
• Because of the relative ease in filtering harmonic voltages at high frequencies, it is
desirable to use as high a switching frequency as possible, except for one
significant drawback: Switching losses in the inverter switches increase proportionally
with the switching frequency fs.
• Therefore, in most applications, the switching frequency is selected to be either less
than 6 kHz or greater than 20 kHz to be above the audible range.
• If the optimum switching frequency (based on the overall system performance) turns out
to be somewhere in the 6—20-kHz range, then the disadvantages of increasing
it to 20 kHz are often outweighed by the advantage of no audible noise with fs of 20
kHz
or greater.
• Therefore, in 50 or 60-Hz type applications, such as ac motor drives (where
the fundamental frequency of the inverter output may be required to be as high as 200
Hz), the frequency modulation ratio mf may be 9 or even less for switching frequencies
of less than 2 kHz.
• On the other hand, mf will be larger than 100 for switching frequencies higher
than 20 kHz.
• The desirable relationships between the triangular waveform signal and the
control voltage signal are dictated by how large mf is.
• In the discussion here, mf = 21 is treated as the borderline between large and small,
though its selection is somewhat arbitrary. Here, it is assumed that the amplitude 45
modulation ratio ma is less than 1.
3.5a

46
• In the previous discussion, it was assumed that ma <=1.0, corresponding to
a sinusoidal PWM in the linear range.
• Therefore, the amplitude of the fundamental-frequency voltage varies
linearly with ma, as derived in Eq. 3-7.
• In this range of ma<=1.0, PWM pushes the harmonics into a high-
frequency range around the switching frequency and its multiples.
• In spite of this desirable feature of a sinusoidal PWM in the linear range,
one of
the drawbacks is that the maximum available amplitude of the fundamental
frequency component is not as high as we wish.
• This is a natural consequence of the notches in the output voltage waveform
of Fig. 3-5b.
• To increase further the amplitude of the fundamental frequency component
in the output voltage, ma is increased beyond 1.0, resulting in what is called
overmodulation.
• Overmodulation causes the output voltage to contain many more harmonics
in the side bands as compared with the linear range (with ma 1.0), as shown
in Fig. 3-7.
47
• The harmonics with dominant amplitudes in the linear range may not be dominant during
overmodulation.
• More significantly, with overmodulation, the amplitude of the fundamental-frequency
component does not vary linearly with the amplitude modulation ratio
ma.
• Figure 3-8 shows the normalized peak amplitude of the fundamental-frequency com-

48
3.7

• These are harmonics of the fundamental frequency

49
3.8

• Shows the linear and the over-

modulation regions; square-wave
operation in the limit

50
• The overmodulation region is avoided in uninterruptible power supplies because
of a stringent requirement on minimizing the distortion in the output voltage.
• In induction motor drives, overmodulation is normally used
• For sufficiently large values of ma, the inverter voltage waveform degenerates
from a pulse-width-modulated waveform into a square wave, which is
discussed in detail in the next section.
• From Fig. 3-8 and the discussion of square-wave switching to be presented
in the next section, it can be concluded that in the overmodulation region with
ma > I

3.12

51
 3.4

3.9a

3.13

And 3.14

• where the harmonic order h takes on only odd values, as shown in Fig. 3-9b.
• It should be noted that the square-wave switching is also a special case of the sinusoidal
PWM switching when ma becomes so large that the control voltage waveform intersects
with the triangular waveform in Fig. 3-5a only at the zero crossing of Vcontrol
• Therefore, the output voltage is independent of ma in the square-wave region, as shown in
Fig. 3-8.

52
• One of the advantages of the square-wave operation is that each inverter switch
changes its state only twice per cycle, which is important at very high power levels
where the solid-state switches generally have slower turn-on and turn-off speeds.
• One of the serious disadvantages of square-wave switching is that the inverter is not
capable of regulating the output voltage magnitude.
• Therefore, the dc input voltage vd to the inverter must be adjusted in order to control
the magnitude of the inverter output voltage.

3.9
Harmonics are of the fundamental frequency
53
54
• Capacitors provide the mid-point

55
 3.15
And

3.16

56
• A full-bridge inverter is shown in Fig. 3-11.
• This inverter consists of two one-leg inverters of the type discussed in before and is
preferred over other arrangements in higher power ratings.
• With the same dc input voltage, the maximum output voltage of the fu11 bridge inverter
is twice that of the half-bridge inverter.
• This implies that for the same power, the output current and the switch currents are one-
half of those for a half-bridge inverter.
• At high power levels, this is a distinct advantage, since it requires less paralleling of
devices.

• Consists of two inverter

legs

57
58
59
60
 Analysis assuming Fictitious Filters
• For simplicity, fictitious L-C high-frequency filters will be used at the dc side as well as
at the ac side, as shown in Fig. 8-13.
• The switching frequency is assumed to be very high, approaching infinity.
• Therefore, to filter out the high-switching-frequency components in vo and i d, he filter
components L and C required in both ac- and dc-side filters approach zero.
• This implies that the energy stored in the filters is negligible. Since the converter itself
has no energy storage elements, the instantaneous power input must equal
the instantaneous power output.
• Having made these assumptions, vo in Fig. 8-13 is a pure sine wave at the fundamental
output frequency ω1 ,

61
• Small fictitious filters eliminate the switching-frequency related ripple
62
• In practical systems, the previous assumption of a constant dc voltage as the input to the
inverter is not entirely valid.
• Normally, this dc voltage is obtained by rectifying the ac utility line voltage.
• A large capacitor is used across the rectifier output terminals to filter the dc voltage.
• The ripple in the capacitor voltage, which is also the dc input voltage to the inverter, is due
to two reasons:
• (I) The rectification of the line voltage to produce dc does not result in a pure dc
• (2) the current drawn by a single-phase inverter from the dc side is not a constant dc but
has a second harmonic component (of the fundamental frequency at the inverter output) in
addition to the high switching-frequency components.
• The second harmonic current component results in a ripple in the capacitor voltage,
although the voltage ripple due to the high switching frequencies is essentially negligible.

63
 DC-Side Current

• Bi-Polar Voltage switching

64
65
Output Waveforms: Uni-
polar Voltage Switching

• Harmonic components
around the switching
frequency are absent

66
The waveforms of Fig. 8-15 show that there are four combinations of switch on-states
and the corresponding voltage levels:

67
And

68
69
70
71
72
DC-Side Current in a Single-Phase Inverter

• Uni-polar voltage switching

73
 Sinusoidal Synthesis by Voltage Shift

74
• Phase shift allows voltage cancellation to synthesize a 1-Phase sinusoidal output
75
And

76
77
 Single-Phase Inverter

• Analysis at the fundamental frequency 78

79
 Push-Pull Inverter

• Low Voltage to higher output using square-wave

operation
80
 Three Phase Inverter
 The ac voltage produced by 1-ph inverter is a poor version of
sine wave and also not suitable for industrial 3-ph supply.3-ph
inverter my be implemented for example with six switches.
- To obtain 3-ph voltage switches can be triggered in two ways
of conducting modes, viz., 180o mode of conduction and 120o
mode of conduction
- In 180o mode of conduction switches in the same arm (leg)
conduct for 180o and in each interval (60o) 3 switches ON.
- In 120o mode of operation switches in the same group conduct
after 120o and in each interval 2 switches conduct.

81
Three Phase Inverter - cont-ed

82
Three Phase Inverter - cont-ed

83
 Three-Phase Inverter

• Three inverter legs; capacitor mid-point is fictitious 84

85
 Three-
Phase
PWM
Waveforms

86
87
88
89
90
Three-Phase Inverter: Square-Wave Mode

91
• Harmonics are of the fundamental frequency
92
Chapter Three: Resonant Converters

93