Experimental Evaluation of the Performance of a Three-Phase Five-Level Cascaded H-Bridge Inverter by Means FPGA-Based Control Board for Grid Connected Applications

Over the last decades, plants devoted to the generation of green energy significantly increased their number, together with the demand of same electrical energy, also stored in battery systems. This fact produced the growth of energy conversion systems with advanced performances with respect to the traditional ones. In this circumstance, multilevel converters play a significant role for their great advantages in performances, flexibility, fault-tolerability, employment of renewable energy sources and storage systems and finally yet importantly reduced filter requirements. In this context, this paper faces the performance of a cascaded H-bridge 5 level inverter in terms of harmonic distortion generated and injected into the grid. Through an accurate analysis that takes into account the pulse width modulation (PWM) multicarrier modulation techniques (phase disposition PD, phase opposition disposition POD, alternative phase opposition disposition APOD, phase shifted PS) and related reference signals (sinusoidal reference; third harmonic injection THI reference, switching frequency optimal SFO reference), a framework of distorting harmonics is presented by comparing twelve cases. The results obtained from the simulations are reproduced and validated in a prototype system of five level cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverter. A deep discussion of control and filtering system is provided to justify the choice of the best modulation technique to adopt.