A three-phase soft-transition inverter with a novel control strategy for zero-current and near zero-voltage switching

This paper proposes a new soft-transition control strategy for a three-phase zero-current-transition (ZCT) inverter circuit. Each phase leg of the inverter circuit consists of an LC resonant tank, two main switches, and two auxiliary switches. The proposed strategy is realized by planning the switching patterns and timings of these four switches based on the load current information. It enables all the main switches and auxiliary switches to be turned on and turned off under zero-current conditions, and achieves a near zero-voltage turn-on for the main switches. Compared with existing ZCT strategies, the diode reverse recovery current and switching turn-on loss are substantially reduced, the current and thermal stresses in the auxiliary devices are evenly distributed over every switching cycle, and the resonant capacitor voltage stress is reduced from twice the dc bus voltage to 1.3-1.4 times the dc bus voltage. Meanwhile, the soft transition for each phase is executed independently from the main controller. Consequently, any PWM scheme developed for hard-switching inverters is applicable, and there is no compromise in order to use any well-proven control techniques. The proposed strategy is also suitable for three-phase power-factor-correction (PFC) rectifier applications. The operation principles, including a detailed analysis based on the state-plane technique, and a design rule are described in this paper. The circuit operation is first verified by a computer simulation, and is then tested with a 50-kW three-phase inverter to the full power level together with a three-phase induction motor in a closed-loop speed/torque control. Significant reductions in switching losses and voltage/current stresses over existing techniques have been experimentally demonstrated.