Grant: Alliance Grants

Power electronic converters (PECs) are a prevalent and most efficient technology for AC to DC power conversion and vice versa. They are used in every industry, from electric vehicle (EV) chargers, to variable-speed motor drives, heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems, and so on where more than 70% of the produced energy transferred and converted by utilizing these devices. This research project introduces new concept of scalable power electronic converters technology. This new approach allows for integrating enhanced high power density and high efficiency hybrid wide bandgap (WBG) based multilevel power electronic converter configurations adding to it the flexibility which permit to increase the power rating and resiliency of the overall power conversion system. Moreover, proper paralleling of several converters necessitates special control and modulation techniques to eliminate or mitigate circulating current and equal power sharing between inverters. Novel control techniques and modulation methods for paralleled inverters for providing fast transient response, equal power sharing between the paralleled inverters, minimizing circulating current, ensuring therefore reliable, flexible, and redundant control are required. Accordingly, the objective of this research project can be summarized as follows. First, a fully industrial high-power density and high efficiency three-phase hybrid WBG based multilevel power electronic converter cell (MPECC) including all passive and active components with volumetric power density higher than 4 kW/dm3 and efficiency higher than 98.5% will be developed. Then, a scalable modular bidirectional back-to-back multilevel converter comprising two different parallel configurations of MPECCs will be developed.