A novel PWM strategy for five-phase voltage source inverters

Multi-phase motors are nowadays considered for high-power variable-speed drive applications due to numerous advantages that they offer when compared to their three-phase counterparts. Multi-phase voltage source inverters are invariably used to provide multi-phase variable voltage and variable frequency with appropriate pulse width modulation (PWM) control. In this paper, a novel PWM algorithm for five-phase voltage source inverters is presented with a detailed explanation. The proposed approach presents that various PWM schemes can be implemented with lower computational burden and it is possible to make a seamless change from one modulation scheme to another. The effectiveness of the proposed modulation strategy is verified by numerical simulations.