Design of a SiC-based Five-Level Stacked Multicell Converter for High-Speed Motor Drives

The high-speed motor drives have been widely used in the industrial applications for their low weight and volume. Multilevel converters are promising topologies as they have high output voltage quality, low switching frequency and small output voltage step. The wide-bandgap (WBG) devices such as SiC MOSFET are suitable for the application due to their low losses and high switching speed. In this study, a three-phase five-level Stacked Multicell Converter (SMC) using SiC MOSFETs is designed for high-speed motor drives. The properties and the advantages of the selected topology are explored. The need of over-voltage mitigation filters is eliminated, reducing the total loss and weight of the system. The converter design is presented, including switching device selection, passive component selection, printed circuit board (PCB) design and is validated by experimental results.