Three Phase Motor drive with Photovoltaic Source using Multilevel Three Phase Inverter with Maximum Power Point Tracking

Abstract

Industrial machines specially three phase AC motors operates at high power ratings which cannot be achieved by conventional inverters due to large change of voltage and switching losses, for Reliability of operation and low harmonic distortion multilevel inverters are introduced with high power medium voltage applications. The proposed multilevel inverter uses Solar PV arrays as DC source through which maximum power is extracted to get voltage required for three phase inverter input to achieve multilevel voltage waveform with low harmonic distortion and maximizing the power. Multilevel three phase inverter is implemented using a DC source, power switches and diodes. After achieving the maximum power from multilevel three phase inverter the objective is to get maximum torque using frequency and switching control. Three phase induction motor using the multilevel three phase inverter is simulated under variable irradiance level and variable speed to verify the operation and performance of three phase multilevel inverter.