A Cost-Effective Three Level Shared Leg Flying Capacitor Converter for Switched Reluctance Motors

This paper presents a novel, cost-effective multilevel inverter for switched reluctance motor (SRM) drives. The proposed inverter has a three- level topology with shared-leg flying-capacitor (SLFC) structure. This topology utilizes two shared legs for adjacent phases during the magnetization, freewheeling, and demagnetization of the SRM. This innovative approach reduces the drive’s size and cost by reducing the number of power switches, diodes, gate drivers, current and voltage sensors while achieving the same performance as the conventional three-level flying capacitor topology. In comparison to the conventional asymmetric half bridge converter, it improves the performance in terms of current ripple and reduces the voltage stress of some of semiconductors. The feasibility of the proposed three-level SLFC topology is verified through simulation studies based on a three-phase 12/16 SRM drive system.