M3D‐DPWM strategy for three‐phase four‐leg inverter with higher harmonic suppression capability

Abstract Three‐phase four‐leg inverters are widely used in power systems due to their inherent ability to handle unbalanced loads. However, with conventional 3D space vector pulse width modulation (3D‐SVPWM), high harmonics of large amplitude exist in the output voltage around the switching frequency and its integer multiples leading to noise in the load motor and limiting the application range of the inverter system. The passband amplification of conventional sinusoidal filters and their cutoff frequency vary with the load, so it is particularly important to investigate the regulation strategy with harmonic suppression. In this study, an improved 3D discontinuous pulse width modulation (M3D‐DPWM) strategy is proposed based on 3D‐SVPWM. By reducing the conventional 3D‐SVPWM switching segments and changing the vector synthesis sequence of the last half switching cycle, the output phase voltage period is reduced to half of the original one, which achieves the purpose of suppressing the output voltage at the switching frequency and its odd multiple high harmonics without changing the fundamental characteristics and adding additional circuits. In contrast, the conventional 3D‐SVPWM switching frequency is increased to 20 kHz to achieve similar performance. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed strategy is verified by simulation and experiment.