Vol.:(0123456789) 1 3 Electrical Engineering (2021) 103:2473–2495 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00202-021-01245-1 ORIGINAL PAPER Design space exploration of optimized hybrid SVPWM techniques based on spatial region for three level VSI G. Vivek 1  · Meenu D. Nair 2  · Jayanta Biswas 3  · Mukti Barai 4 Received: 9 October 2020 / Accepted: 10 February 2021 / Published online: 2 March 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH, DE part of Springer Nature 2021 Abstract The performance of a multilevel inverter depends upon design and selection of an appropriate modulation technique. Space vector pulse width modulation (SVPWM) technique ofers more fexibility than other pulse width modulation (PWM) techniques. However, conventional SVPWM technique becomes more complex for multilevel inverter because of increased number of space vectors and redundant switching states. This paper presents a design space exploration method of hybrid SVPWM techniques for three level voltage source inverter (VSI) to reduce total harmonic distortion (THD) and switching loss over wide linear modulation range. A new parameter Harmonic Loss (product of weighted total harmonic distortion factor of the line voltage (V wthd ) and normalized switching loss) is introduced as an objective function, and a spatial region identifcation algorithm is proposed to determine the optimized switching sequences for hybrid SVPWM technique. Two optimized hybrid SVPWM techniques are proposed based on the optimized switching sequences for three level VSI. The proposed hybrid SVPWM techniques are implemented on a low cost PIC microcontroller (PIC 18F452) and applied on an experimental prototype of three phase three level VSI with an induction motor as load. The experimental results are dem- onstrated to validate the performance of the proposed hybrid SVPWM techniques. Keywords Voltage source inverter (VSI) · Multilevel inverter (MLI) · Space vector PWM (SVPWM) · Harmonic distortion · Switching loss 1 Introduction In recent years, multilevel inverters (MLIs) are widely being used in high power and high voltage applications. MLIs have many advantages over a two level inverter, e.g., reduced volt- age stress on power semiconductor devices, lower dv/dt, less harmonic in output voltage and current, better output wave- form quality. The performance of MLIs depend on PWM techniques used to achieve less total harmonic distortion (THD) and lower switching loss over wide linear modula- tion range. There are two popular real time PWM techniques for MLIs, (1) sinusoidal carrier-based PWM (SPWM) and (2) space vector PWM (SVPWM) techniques, respectively. SVPWM technique is the most popular method for two level and multilevel VSIs. It provides better performance in terms of low harmonic distortion, high DC-link voltage utilization, low switching loss, higher linear modulation range and easy digital implementation compared to SPWM [1–8]. SVPWM also provides a lot of fexibility to optimize the switching sequences for reducing the total harmonic distortion (THD) and switching loss. There are many signifcant advantages * G. Vivek gvivek1988@gmail.com Meenu D. Nair meenudnair@gmail.com Jayanta Biswas jayantab2002@gmail.com Mukti Barai muktib@nitc.ac.in 1 Propulsion Control Engineer, Bombardier Transportation, Vadodara, Gujarat, India 2 Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Karpagam Collage of Engineering, Coimbatore, India 3 Department of Computer Science, Christ University, Bangalore, India 4 Department of Electrical Engineering, NIT Calicut, Calicut, India