Operation and modulation of H7 current source inverter with hybrid SiC and Si semiconductor switches

This paper proposes a H7 current source inverter (CSI) with a single shunt-connected silicon carbide (SiC) switch and traditional H6 CSI circuitry, which could employ the superior characteristics of SiC switch to significantly increase the whole switching frequency with expected low losses simultaneously. A novel modulation scheme for H7 current source inverter is then proposed, which can significantly reduce the switching counts and meanwhile realize the zero current switching (ZCS) for the rear-end CSI circuitry. The proposed H7 current source inverter can guarantee the high performance and high efficiency with a smaller DC inductor. To some extent, the H7 current source inverter circuitry could be a universal solution for all CSI systems. Matlab simulations and experimental verifications have been presented to show the performance of proposed inverter.