Chapter 7 - Multilevel inverter applications for electric vehicle drives

Abstract

Electric vehicles (EVs), both hybrid EVs (HEVs) and plug-in EVs (PEVs), have been widely researched and studied. The PEVs have an all-electric system, while the HEVs are based on joint operation of an internal combustion engine (ICE) and electric motor in the same EV. The PEVs or all-electric vehicles, focused on in this chapter, use a traction drive managed by an electric motor, and the system’s propulsion is obtained by the mechanical energy generated by this electric motor. The motor can also be operated in a generator mode, which generates energy from braking that is used to charge the batteries. In this chapter, a literature survey of EVs is first presented. The PEVs comprise three main stages: batteries, power converters, and electric motor. The power converters are implemented and analyzed in two modes of operation, as a DC-DC converter responsible for energy management of the batteries in charging/discharging intervals, while the second mode is as an inverter, the main focus of the chapter. The applications of multilevel inverters (MLIs) in EVs are covered in detail. MLI topologies used in EV traction control are examined, including cascaded H-bridge, neutral point clamped, active neutral point clamped, t-type neutral point clamped inverters, and others. Control methods are also presented and analyzed.