Safe operating area of high power three-level neutral point clamped voltage source inverters equipped with IGCTs

To design and analyze the behavior of high power inverter, the definition and application of the inverter´s own safe operating area (SOA) are presented in this paper. The relation between the switch devices behaviors and the other components of the inverter is playing a key role in the description of the novel SOA. Based on the proposed idea, the optimization of a real 1.25 MW/3.3 kV inverter equipped with IGCTs is presented and analyzed. The corresponding experimental results are shown.