The development of high-power medium voltage variable speed drives is an inevitable research area to meet the ever-increasing industrial production levels, economic and zero carbon footprint. We PEARL research group especially work towards finding optimal power electronic converters for medium voltage drive applications to enhance their performance, reliability and power density.
The existing medium voltage industrial drives have been established with variants of standard multilevel converters such as neutral point converters, cascaded H-bridge, etc., due to the reduced switching frequency, low dv/dt and high-quality output voltage. However, on the eve of increasing power/production levels, the existing drives are difficult to scale up, unreliable, and inefficient. Our research group aims to develop a state-of-the-art medium voltage drive system based on multilevel converter topologies targeting to achieve better efficiency, high reliability, modularity, and low footprint.