A four-level crossing dc/dc converter based drive system

This paper introduces a novel crossing front-end dc/dc converter for a four-level drive system which provides a voltage boost as well as dc capacitor bank voltage regulation. The primary advantage of the proposed converter is that it simplifies the control of the four-level diode-clamped inverter since capacitor voltage balancing is not required by the inverter control. Furthermore, the inverter modulation index can be varied up to its physical limitation. An average-value model of the converter is derived and used for insight and analysis of the converter operation. Detailed simulations of the four-level drive system demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system.