MS student Arjit Bali with Advisor A. Stillwell

Electric vehicle and electric aviation applications require lightweight electro-mechanical energy conversion, however, passive components in the drive system can constrain the power density. Slotless machine construction can attain high power density, but such designs result in very low per-phase machine inductances. The reduced inductance imposes additional filtering requirements between the inverter and motor, which lower the power density benefits gained from the slotless design. Furthermore, the dc-link capacitor within the inverter significantly increases overall weight and volume. My research explores the advantages of interleaving multilevel topologies and proposes an interleaved hybrid active neutral point clamped (I-HANPC) converter to achieve reduced output filter sizes and enable a smaller dc-link capacitor. The design diagram (Figure 1) is demonstrated

Figure 1. Design schematic of I-HANPC converter to achieve reduced output filter size and enable a smaller dc-link capacitor.

with a seven-level I-HANPC experimental hardware prototype (Figure 2) that attains a peak efficiency of 98.8% with low output total harmonic distortion. My research is funded by POETS within the Mech SE Department.

Figure 2. Hardware prototype of 7-level I-HANPC converter that attains a peck efficiency of 98.8% with low output total harmonic distortion.