Control Technique for High-Frequency Soft-Switching Three-Phase Inverter Under Grid Fault Condition

This paper presents a control method for three-phase inverter under grid fault condition based on a novel critical conduction mode (CRM)-based soft-switching modulation. In the soft-switching modulation, one phase is clamped to dc bus, other two phases operate in CRM and discontinuous conduction mode (DCM), respectively. The soft-switching technique with silicon carbide (SiC) power devices allows the inverter to operate at hundreds of kHz with high efficiency by reducing switching loss. In order to extend the modulation scheme to more practical cases, behavior of the inverter under grid fault conditions, specifically voltage sag, is investigated. During voltage sag, the grid voltage becomes unbalanced requiring unbalanced ac current reference for the avoidance of output active power oscillation. With the unbalanced grid voltage and ac current reference, continuous conduction mode (CCM) operation occurs where DCM operation is intended leading to high turn-on loss. To eliminate the CCM operation and reduce the turn-on loss, an improved modulation technique is proposed by using off-time extension concept in CRM phase. In this paper, how the CCM operation appears under grid fault condition, and details of the proposed control are discussed. Performance of the proposed control method is validated experimentally with SiC-based three-phase inverter laboratory prototype.