Hybrid SiC and Si Based Four-Level Hybrid Active Neutral Point Clamped Converter

The three-level active neutral point clamped (3L-ANPC) converter is a good alternative for high-speed and high-power motor drive applications due to lower dv/dt and less EMI than the conventional two-level inverter. To further reduce dv/dt and EMI filter size, the five-level active neutral point clamped (5L-ANPC) converter is widely utilized. However, the 5L-ANPC converter has three flying capacitors, which inevitably leads to large volume, weight, and cost for high power applications. To guarantee low dv/dt, light weight and low cost, a SiC and Si based four-level hybrid active neutral-point-clamped (4L-HANPC) converter is proposed in this paper. The proposed hybrid 4L-HANPC converter has lower dv/dt than the 3L-ANPC converter and smaller size and lighter weight than the 5L-ANPC converter. Besides, compared to the existing four-level converters implemented based on all SiC MOSFETs, the proposed hybrid 4L-HANPC converter based on half SiC MOSFETs and half IGBTs shows a much lower cost.