Hierarchical carrier-based discontinuous PWM strategy for hybrid-switch current source rectifier

This paper proposes a hybrid-switch three-phase current source rectifier (CSR) solution, which employs only one silicon carbide (SiC) switch and six traditional silicon (Si) switches. The corresponding hierarchical discontinuous pulse width modulation (HDPWM) strategy for the proposed CSR is also presented, which uses two parallel carrier-based discontinuous PWM branches to perform differentiated modulation operations on Si and SiC devices to endow the Si switches with zero current switching capability and conveniently make full use of the high-speed and low-loss advantages of SiC devices. Consequently, the proposed hybrid-switch CSR with HDPWM can even work as a full SiC device-switching converter with relatively lower costs, thus addressing the critical needs of efficiency promotion of CSR applications. MATLAB simulations and experimental verifications were conducted to verify the performance of the proposed CSR solution.