Hardware Evaluation for GaN-Based Single-Phase Five-Level Inverter

This study aims to assess the performance of Gallium Nitride (GaN)-based inverters in high-power applications through simulations and a hardware-in-the-loop experiment. The focus is on the efficacy of GaN-based inverters for multilevel topologies, a five-level GaN-based cascaded H-bridge inverter controlled by a Texas Instruments (TI) C2000 microcontroller was used to conduct a hardware-in-the-loop experiment. Prior to the experiment, simulations were conducted to showcase the setup of the half-bridge, full-bridge, and five-level cascaded H-bridge inverter, as well as the generation of Pulse Width Modulation (PWM). To test the performance of the multilevel converter topology, specifically the five-level cascaded H-bridge, an evaluation board of a GaN-based half-bridge from Efficient Power Conversion Inc. and a daughter board from GaN Systems Inc. were utilized as the non-linear components in the hardware-in-loop experiments. PWM pulses were generated by the TI microcontroller for most of the setups and phase-shifted modulation was implemented for the five-level cascaded H-bridge inverter. Experimental results are demonstrated with five-level voltages which further indicates a promising future for GaN-based inverters in high-power applications.