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Multiphase Space Vector Pulse Width Modulation

John W. Kelly, Elias G. Strangas, and John M. Miller
AbstractPole-phase modulation adjusts the pole-phase ratio of an induction machine and requires a multileg, multiphase inverter. This paper analyzes an -leg, -phase inverter, and presents techniques for -phase space vector pulse width modulation (SVPWM). In particular, nine-phase SVPWM is developed and implemented on a nine winding induction machine. The nine-phase SVPWM is compared to nine phase sine-triangle PWM in terms of dc bus utilization. Index TermsInverter, pole phase modulation, space vector pulse width modulation.

I. INTRODUCTION OST ac machine applications, such as electrical drive systems, require a three-phase three-leg inverter supplying a three-phase machine. However, there are a few applications that require a multiphase system where an -leg inverter supplies an -phase machine. Applications that require a high-degree of reliability may use a multiphase system to reduce the effects of accidental unsymmetrical operation [1], [2]. Applications involving high power may require multiphase systems, in order to reduce stress on the switching devices. Two approaches to supplying high power systems are the use of multilevel inverters supplying three-phase machines and multileg inverters supplying multiphase machines. Zhao and Lipo [3] and Abbas et al. [4] have worked extensively with six-phase inverters supplying a six-phase machine. Much more work has been done on multilevel inverters (e.g., by Peng [5]). It is interesting to note the similarity in switching schemes between the two approaches: for the multilevel inverter the additional switching devices increase the number of voltage levels, while for the multileg inverter, the additional number of switching devices increases the number of phases. A new application for a multiphase system is contactorless pole-phase modulation control of an induction machine. Polephase modulation is a control technique that extends the speedtorque range of induction machines. Osama and Lipo [6], [7] have demonstrated how a six-phase dual stator wound induction motor can switch between two different pole configurations (2:1 pole ratio) to meet torque and speed requirements. In this case, pole-changing is accomplished by reversing the phase output on one of the two three-phase inverters. For a single machine with reconfigurable stator winding, pole-changing can be accomplished by changing the phase
Manuscript received November 28, 2001; revised April 24, 2002. J. Kelly and E. Strangas are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824 USA (e-mail: kellyjo2@egr.msu.edu; strangas@egr.msu.edu). J. Miller is with Ford Motor Co., Vehicle Electronics Systems Department, Dearborn, MI 48121 USA. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TEC.2003.811725

order. For example, a nine-winding, symmetrically wound induction machine can operate as either a 12- or four-pole machine: for 12-pole operation, the nine-windings and the nine-leg inverter are configured for three-phase operation. By reconfiguring the machine and inverter for nine-phase operation, the number of poles is changed to four. Extended speed-torque range is desired for several automotive induction motor applications. In this paper, a comprehensive analysis of a multileg, multiphase inverter is presented, and a novel technique for PWM implementation is proposed. First, the -leg inverter will be examined in terms of the switching period. The inload equivalent circuit during a verter switching states determine the current direction through the phase loads. During this time, the inverter and the star-connected load pattern can be represented by an equivalent circuit consisting of a dc supply and parallel/series impedances, the load equivalent circuit. This is used to determine the current through each one of the phases during a switching period. Unlike the three-phase inverter, which has only one load possible such equivalent circuit, an -leg inverter has circuits. Each one of these equivalent circuits can be used in a -step mode to produce a unique discrete voltage waveform. These waveforms differ in terms of harmonic content and magnitude of the fundamental component. As shown by Holtz [8], the fundamental component of the three-phase six-step voltage . On the other hand, a nine-phase inverter waveform is has four different such voltage waveforms, with fundamental , 0.56 , 0.41 , 0.22 . components of 0.64 For most electrical machines, the stator windings are assumed sinusoidally distributed. Voltage space-vectors are defined based on the voltages applied to the windings. For the conventional three-phase inverter connected to an electrical machine, there are eight such space-vectors possible. For a -leg inverter connected to a -phase machine, there are possible space-vectors. However, it is not practical to use all space-vectors in a PWM realization of a desired voltage. Implementation of PWM in a multileg, multiphase inverter supplying star-connected load is examined in detail. In particular, a generalized theory and implementation method for -phase space-vector PWM is presented. This theory is developed here by extending three-phase SVPWM to a multiphase system. The multiphase SVPWM is compared to nonspace vector PWM in terms of dc bus utilization. Throughout this paper, a nine-leg inverter is used as a practical example. In Section IV, experimental data from a nine-phase SVPWM system are presented. II. ANALYSIS OF THE NINE-LEG INVERTER The nine-leg inverter of Fig. 1 requires 18 gating signals, . The gating combination determines the phase voltage

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Fig. 1.

Nine-leg inverter. Fig. 2. Four equivalent load configurations of a nine-leg inverter.

across each of the nine separate loads, which are connected at a point to form a star. Depending on the gating pattern, the nine phase loads can form four different equivalent circuits. For example, when , the the gating pattern is load equivalent circuit consists of a group of four parallel impedances in series with a group of five parallel impedances as shown in Fig. 2(a). Likewise, the 36 equivalent circuit configuration shown in Fig. 2(b), is formed by three parallel impedances in series with a group of six parallel impedances. One of the possible inverter gating patterns for this case is or, in terms of energized inverter legs, , where 1 represents the upper switch of the inverter leg closed and the lower switch open. The other two possibilities are the 27 and the 18 configuration, Fig. 2(c) and (d). A. Load Circuit Analysis Table I shows the equivalent impedance, source current, and the maximum phase current for the four different load circuits. The corresponding quantities for a three-phase inverter were included for comparison. Of the four possible load circuit configurations, the 45 one results in maximum phase current and the smallest ratio of phase current to source current. For the 18 configuration, one inverter leg carries the entire source current, while the other eight legs carry only 1/8th of the total current. B. -Step Inverter Operation

Fig. 3. 45 18-step operation: gating signals(upper switches) and the resulting phase voltages. TABLE I EQUIVALENT CIRCUIT COMPARISON

In a three-phase inverter operating in six-step mode, switching states are changed every sixth of a cycle. The and four possible phase-to-neutral voltage levels are . The sequence of the six switching states is such that only one switch changes state at a time. This sequence produces three phase voltages, displaced 120 that appear in stair-step shape. For 18-step mode, the nine-leg inverter changes switching states every eighteenth of a cycle. In order to produce nine symmetrical phase voltages, the nine-leg inverter is restricted to operate in one of four configurations during the complete cycle. This is because a single-level inverter can only produce four different voltage levels during each switching interval. Each of the four possible load circuit configurations produces only four distinct phase-to-neutral voltages. For example, the 45 conand . figuration results in phase voltages of Fig. 3 shows the upper gating signals for 18-step operation in the 45 configuration, along with the resulting nine phase volt. The gating signals and resulting phase voltages ages for 27 eighteen-step operation are shown in Fig. 4.

Fig. 4. 27 eighteen-step operation: gating signals (upper switches) and one of the resulting phase voltages.

In the 27 mode of operation of Fig. 4, five switches change state between conduction intervals. For modes 18, 36, and 45, seven, three, and one switches, respectively, change state.

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TABLE II HARMONIC CONTENT OF 18-STEP MODE VOLTAGE WAVEFORMS

Fig. 6.

Nine-phase voltage space-vectors.

at the inverter terminals determined by the switching state, and the angular displacement of the stator phase windings . . .
Fig. 5. (a) Continuous three-phase voltage space-vector. (b) Possible space-vectors due to six-step operation.

(1) Note that in Fig. 3, only one switch changes state between consecutive conduction intervals. An inverter operating continuously in the 45 switching set would have greater switching efficiency than one operating in the 18 switching mode. More switches have to change states to change voltage levels from 1/9 to 8/9 than from 4/9 to 5/9 . For a three-phase inverter, switching every sixth of a cycle, . Table II shows the phase voltage has a fundamental of the fundamental magnitudes of the waveforms of Figs. 3 and 4. For a nine-leg inverter operating in 18-step mode, the 45 switching set waveform has the highest fundamental, while the 18 switching set has the lowest.

B. Nine Phase Space-Vector For a nine-phase machine, supplied by a nine-leg inverter, possible voltage space-vectors. These vectors are there are calculated as follows:

where

(2)

III. EXTENSION OF SPACE VECTOR THEORY TO

PHASES

Symmetric time-varying electrical quantities operating on spatially distributed functions (i.e., windings) give rise to the concept of space-vectors. In an ac machine stator, voltages are assigned a direction (that of the winding spatial distribution) and their vectorial sum defines the corresponding voltage space-vector. A. Three-Phase Space-Vectors For symmetric three-phase voltages, the resulting sweeps a continuous circular path in the space-vector imaginary-real reference frame (Fig. 5). It rotates at the frequency of the terminal voltages. If, however, a three-leg inverter supplies the voltage, there are only six angular positions the voltage space-vector can take at any instance. The three-leg inverter results in possible space-vector positions. The six nonzero vectors form a hexagon. These spacevectors can be calculated by multiplying the voltage-to-ground

Fig. 6 shows all of the possible positions of the resultant vectors. It should be noted that there are many redundant vectors. The 512 resultant space-vectors of Fig. 6 can be divided into based on the load circuit confour sets figuration as discussed in Section II. Each of these four sets can further be divided based on the number of adjacent on inverter switches. For example, the 18 outermost space-vectors of Fig. 6 are the result of switching combinations of either four or five adjacent on switches. These space-vectors correspond subset. The to the 18 switching states which form the magnitude of these vectors is a result of adjacent phase vectors contributing positively to the resultant voltage space-vector, see Fig. 7. Space-vectors corresponding to the four maximum magni, , , and tude subsets, form four 18-sided polygons shown in Fig. 8. The polygons enclose all of the subsets of the four switching sets. In general, the number of polygons is equal to the number of equivalent load circuits. In Section IV, it will be shown how vectors that form these concentric polygons are used in a multiphase space vector pulse width modulation algorithm.

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Fig. 7.

Vector addition of voltage phase space-vectors.

Fig. 9. Space vector PWM realization of the vector 1:0e

Fig. 10.

1:0e

Vector sequence for the realization of the voltage space-vector .

Fig. 8. Four bounding voltage space-vector subsets of a nine-phase system.

IV. SPACE-VECTOR PWM IMPLEMENTATION Pulse width modulation is a general technique for realizing a voltage reference via an inverter. The duration of the gating pulses controls the frequency and magnitude of the inverter output voltage. Space vector pulse width modulation (SVPWM) is a PWM technique that uses space-vectors to generate these gating durations. Section IV-A reviews three-phase SVPWM. In Section IV-B, a new general algorithm is proposed, which extends present three-phase SVPWM to -phase SVPWM. A. Three-Phase Space-Vector PWM Three-phase SVPWM, [8], increases the dc bus utilization compared to PWM based on sine-triangle comparison [9]. By injecting the third harmonic into the reference voltage signal, the fundamental of the phase voltage can be increased. SVPWM is implemented by averaging the time spent in adjacent switching states. The drawback of this algorithm is the need for trigonometric calculations. This method can be simplified, [10], by adding a voltage offset to the phase voltages. The addition of this offset centers the three voltage reference signals about the dc axis, implicitly adding the third harmonic, and allowing the three signals to be increased. The operation requires only addition and multiplication operations. B. Extension of Three-Phase SVPWM to -Phase SVPWM For a -phase system, the th harmonic signal can be injected to the voltage reference. The offset signal is by adding (3)

Realizing a voltage space-vector by applying this algorithm to a nine-phase inverter results in the switching states shown in Fig. 9. Also shown in the figure are the nine upper gating pulses. The switching states generated by this algorithm are exclusively from the four subsets described in Section III. Apparent in Fig. 9 is that only one switch changes state at a time. Fig. 10 shows the switching state sequence for half a sampling period in terms of corresponding space-vectors. The of Fig. 9 can be determined switching times by solving (4) (5) (6) (7)

(8)

(9) (10) The reference voltage vector of Fig. 10 can be constructed , from vectors which are proportional to the vectors of , , and

(11)

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Fig. 11. (a) Windings of a 3/9 phase machine in three-phase operation. (b) Nine-phase operation. (c) Windings of a conventional three-phase machine.

Each of the windings in the nine-phase configuration has one third of the turns per phase of the windings in the three-phase configuration, hence the term 1/3 in (10). We define as equivalent systems those that produce equal peak air-gap flux density for the same voltage. Fig. 11(a) and (b) illustrate the placement of windings for a machine designed to operate as either a nine-phase or three-phase one. Fig. 11(c) shows the winding configuration of a conventional three-phase machine with the same number of turns. The resultant winding distribution factor for one phase in Fig. 11(a) will be less than that of Fig. 11(c). Therefore, the resulting voltage space-vectors have lower magnitude. For a conventional three-phase machine, the six possible , nonzero voltage space-vectors have a magnitude of 2/3 while for the three-phase machine of Fig. 11(a), the voltage vec. tors have a magnitude of We define the modulation index as the ratio of the fundato the dc input voltage mental of the output voltage (12) When SVPWM is applied to the conventional three-phase machine of Fig. 11(c), the maximum possible modulation index is (13) This is approximately an increase in fundamental of 15.4% compared to three phase sine-triangle PWM, which has a maximum possible modulation index of 0.5. For the winding distribution as in Fig. 11(a), the maximum possible modulation is (14) When the same machine is operated in nine-phase SVPWM, the maximum index is (15) This is an increase in fundamental of approximately 1.5% compared to nine phase sine-triangle PWM. This difference can be illustrated by comparing the phase voltage reference signals for nine-phase SVPWM and sine-triangle PWM. Fig. 12 compares the commanded phase voltage for a nine-phase induction machine operating in nine-phase SVPWM and sine-triangle PWM. Fourier series analysis of the two voltage signals of Fig. 12 verifies the increase in fundamental of 1.55%. As shown in Fig. 12, the ninth order harmonic is present in the commanded SVPWM phase voltage. This harmonic injection

Fig. 12. Comparison between commanded phase voltage of nine-phase SVPWM and sine-triangle PWMdc bus of 40 V.

Fig. 13. Experimental setup.

allows for increase in fundamental. The ninth order harmonic is filtered in a nine-phase load. However, the possible increase in fundamental is not as great as with third order harmonic injection in the three-phase system, 0.507 versus 0.577. As the number of phases increases, the magnitude of the voltage offset decreases to zero and SVPWM converges to sine-triangle PWM or zero harmonic injection. C. Experimental Results In order to verify the increase in dc bus utilization, several experiments were conducted comparing nine-phase sine-triangle PWM and nine-phase SVPWM. Both methods were implemented by a nine-leg inverter which supplied a nine winding induction machine. Fig. 13 shows the experimental setup. The control program is implemented on a Pentium III PC. The operating system is RT Linux. The field programmable gate array (FPGA) handles communication between the data acquisition board and the PC. In addition, the FPGA produces PWM pulses based on timing information from the PC. Due to the relatively small increase in fundamental for ninephase SVPWM, the difference in voltage and current could not easily be perceived. However, its effect is more readily seen in the increase in both input and output power of the system. The nine-phase induction machine was ran in open-loop control at a frequency of 30 Hz and switching frequency of 6 kHz. The maximum modulation was used for both PWM modes. Torque, speed, phase voltage, and current were sampled at 3 kHz. Fig. 14 is a plot of the measured speed and output power (based on measured torque and speed) of the machine operating in both PWM modes. From the figure, the output power is shown to be greater while operating in SVPWM mode than in sine-triangle. This is also evident in the speed profiles. For the same load, the machine reaches final speed faster when operating in SVPWM mode.

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REFERENCES
[1] E. A. Klingshirn, High phase order induction motorsPart IDescription and theoretical considerations, IEEE Trans. Power App. Syst., vol. 102, pp. 4653, Jan. 1983. , High phase order induction motorsPart IIExperimental re[2] sults, IEEE Trans. Power App. Syst., vol. 102, pp. 5459, Jan. 1983. [3] Y. Zhao and T. A. Lipo, Space vector PWM control of dual three-phase induction machine using vector space decomposition, IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 31, pp. 11771184, Sept./Oct. 1995. [4] M. A. Abbas, R. Christen, and T. M. Jahns, Six-phase voltage source inverter driven induction motor, IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 20, pp. 12511259, Sept./Oct. 1984. [5] F. Z. Peng, A generalized multilevel inverter topology with self voltage balancing, IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 32, pp. 611618, Mar./Apr. 2001. [6] M. Osama and T. A. Lipo, Modeling and analysis of a wide-speed-range induction motor drive based on electronic pole changing, IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 33, pp. 11771184, Sept./Oct. 1997. , A new inverter control scheme for induction motor drives [7] requiring wide speed range, IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 32, pp. 938944, July/Aug. 1996. [8] J. Holtz, P. Lammert, and W. Lotzkat, High-speed drive system with ultrasonic mosfet PWM inverter and single-chip microprocessor, IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 23, pp. 10101015, Nov./Dec. 1987. [9] A. B. Plunkett, A current-controlled PWM transistor inverter drive, in Conf. Rec. IEEE/IAS Annu. Meeting, Oct. 1979, pp. 786792. [10] D. W. Chung, J. S. King, and S. K. Sul, Unified voltage modulation technique for real-time three-phase power conversion, IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 34, pp. 374380, Mar./Apr. 1997.

Fig. 14. Power (output). Comparison between nine-phase SVPWM and nine-phase sine-triangle PWM.

Fig. 15. Phase voltage and current comparison between nine-phase SVPWM and nine-phase sine-triangle PWM.

John W. Kelly received the B.S. degree in mechanical engineering from General Motors Institute, Flint, MI, in 1991, and the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Michigan State University, East Lansing, in 1998. He is currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree at Michigan State University. His area of research is control of electrical drives.

The input power was measured and compared. Fig. 15 compares the phase voltage and current of the machine in both PWM modes. The ninth harmonic is not visually discernible in the SVPWM phase voltage. However, the increased fundamental is observed by comparing the average power. For the period shown in Fig. 15, the average input power for the machine operating in SVPWM mode was 26.7 W, while the power was 26.3 W for sine-triangle PWM. V. CONCLUSIONS Pole-phase modulation requires the use of a multiphase system, since the phase order is adjusted as well as the number phases via of poles. The necessity of implementing a -leg inverter resulted in the extension of conventional three-phase space vector PWM to -phase SVPWM. Two methods are proposed, discussed, and compared, based on sine-triangle comparison and space vector PWM. It is shown that nine-phase SVPWM utilizes better the dc bus compared to sine-triangle. However, as the number of phases increases, the increase in dc bus utilization due to SVPWM diminishes, converging to the results of -phase sine-triangle PWM.

Elias G. Strangas has been on the faculty of Michigan State University, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering since 1986. His teaching interests and research include analysis, design, and control of electrical machines and electrical drives.

John M. Miller was with Ford Motor Co. Scientific Research Laboratories, Dearborn, MI. He is also an Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering at Michigan State University, East Lansing. His interests range from development of novel electromechanical components to advancement of 42 V PowerNet.