Affiliations 

  • 1 Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Seri Iskandar 32610, Perak, Malaysia
  • 2 Department of Electrical, Electronic and Systems Engineering, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi 43600, Selangor, Malaysia
  • 3 Department of Fundamental and Applied Sciences, Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS, Seri Iskandar 32610, Perak, Malaysia
  • 4 Faculty of Engineering, Universiti Teknologi Brunei, Bandar Seri Begawan 1410, Brunei
  • 5 School of Electrical Engineering, College of Engineering Studies, Universiti Teknologi MARA, Shah Alam 40450, Selangor, Malaysia
  • 6 School of Engineering and Technology, Asian Institute of Technology, Pathumthani 12120, Thailand
Micromachines (Basel), 2021 Nov 27;12(12).
PMID: 34945316 DOI: 10.3390/mi12121466

Abstract

In this paper, the performance of an active neutral point clamped (ANPC) inverter is evaluated, which is developed utilizing both silicon (Si) and gallium trioxide (Ga2O3) devices. The hybridization of semiconductor devices is performed since the production volume and fabrication of ultra-wide bandgap (UWBG) semiconductors are still in the early-stage, and they are highly expensive. In the proposed ANPC topology, the Si devices are operated at a low switching frequency, while the Ga2O3 switches are operated at a higher switching frequency. The proposed ANPC mitigates the fault current in the switching devices which are prevalent in conventional ANPCs. The proposed ANPC is developed by applying a specified modulation technique and an intelligent switching arrangement, which has further improved its performance by optimizing the loss distribution among the Si/Ga2O3 devices and thus effectively increases the overall efficiency of the inverter. It profoundly reduces the common mode current stress on the switches and thus generates a lower common-mode voltage on the output. It can also operate at a broad range of power factors. The paper extensively analyzed the switching performance of UWBG semiconductor (Ga2O3) devices using double pulse testing (DPT) and proper simulation results. The proposed inverter reduced the fault current to 52 A and achieved a maximum efficiency of 99.1%.

* Title and MeSH Headings from MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.