2014 International Conference on Advances in Electronics, Computers and Communications (ICAECC)
Design And Implementation Of A Three Level Diode
Clamped Inverter For More Electric Aircraft
Applications Using Hardware In The Loop Simulator
Sona Rebecca Mathew
Electrical and Electronics Department
P.E.S. Institute of Technology
Bangalore, India
sonarmathew@gmail.com
Abstract— Aircraft technology has been witnessing a
complete revamp in the past two decades. The traditional
mechanical, pneumatic and hydraulic systems in civil aircrafts
are beginning to be replaced by lighter and compact electrical
systems. Inverters are indispensable in an aircraft electric system
and are employed for conversion of DC power to AC. Multilevel
inverters reduces the harmonic content in the output waveform
thereby reducing the size of the filter components. This is a major
advantage as weight plays a significant role in aircraft design. In
this paper, a three phase three level diode clamped inverter
operating at 400Hz frequency has been designed and developed,
having lesser distortion factor. The Model is developed in
Matlab/Simulink environment and the control logic for the
inverter power switches is developed by using Hardware-in-the
loop (HIL) platform. The three phase three level diode clamped
inverter prototype results were verified and validated with
aircraft AC voltage specifications.
Keywords—Diode clamped three level inverter, phase
disposition technique, More electric aircrafts, Hardware-in-the loop
simulator.
I. INTRODUCTION
The Aircraft Industry is going through a paradigm shift
with ‘More Electric’ and ‘All Electric’ aircraft technologies
replacing the traditional technologies involving bulky hydraulic
and pneumatic systems. Electric systems are widely being
employed because of the wide range of advantages they have
like faster dynamic response, ease of conversion into other
energy forms. Considering all the above mentioned factors
current electric and power electronic technologies are already
being used in civil aircrafts [1]. In ‘More electric’ and ‘All
electric’ aircrafts there is a substantial increase in the number
of electric motors and motor controllers being utilized when
compared to the conventional technologies. In an aircraft the
comprehensive mass of the components present play a major
role and there is a persistent need to reduce the components
size as it directly affects the overall fuel consumption.
Inverters are an indispensible component in aircraft electric
power systems as they are used for conversion of 28V DC
voltage to 115 Vac. [2]. They are also used as auxiliary supply
978-1-4799-5496-4/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE
P.V.R Sai Kiran, Manish Anand, Adithya Rajeev
Structural Technologies Division, (STTD)
National Aerospace Laboratories
Bangalore, India
pvrsai@gmail.com, manishanand494@gmail.com,
pmadithyarajeev@gmail.com
units in case of failures in the primary power sources like AC
generators in the aircraft electric system. In medium and high
voltage applications two level inverters are preferred due to
their ease in construction and control, but the disadvantage
being increased total harmonic distortion. To remove these
higher magnitude harmonics, bulky AC filters need to be used,
also the insulation in transformers increases owing to high
dv/dt stresses, in turn increasing the weight [3].These
disadvantages can be overcome by using multilevel inverters.
Several topologies of multilevel inverters and their control
schemes are widely being used in various industries in both
high and medium power applications. They reduce the dv/dt
stresses on individual devices. [4]
In a complex and prodigious system like the aircraft, each
and every component present needs to be chosen and tested
with utmost precaution as weight of the components, and their
operation becomes critical in real time when all the
components need to be assembled together. As the various
electric systems are evolving into highly complex designs,
required to facilitate the increasing power levels ,verification
and validation becomes more complex, testing these electric
drive systems, their interfaces and controllers in an
environment that pragmatically replicates the dynamics
becomes a tedious, time consuming and costly process.[1][5]
Hardware-in- the loop is a testing method which helps in
developing and testing complex systems as whole or testing
separate equipment’s in the system in a laboratory, like they
were present in a real system. The main purpose is to speed up
the prototyping phase with easier debugging and time to
market. Hardware in the loop facilitates testing without damage
in the equipment or other anomalies. [6]. The present paper
describes the design and testing of a three phase, three level
diode clamped multilevel inverter, operating at 400Hz
frequency using Hardware-in-the loop simulator. The complete
system model is developed in Matlab-Simulink and the gating
and control signals are generated in real time using FPGA
based data acquisition and control boards which assure fast
loop rates.
 II. DESCRIPTION Si = 1, when S1 and S2 are conducting
0, when S2 and S1’ are conducting
An aircraft electric power system consists of an AC voltage
1, when S1’and S2’ are conducting (1)
rating of 115V rms, 400Hz supply and a DC voltage rating of
28V supply. It includes main power and emergency power The upper- leg and lower- leg capacitor voltages of the
sources, power conversion units, auxiliary power units, control inverter is Vdc/2, hence the output voltage of each leg can be
and protection devices etc. Primary power generation is expressed as
normally AC with one or more Transformer rectifier (TRU) Vi = (Vdc/2)* Si (2)
units converting the AC voltage to DC, feeding the DC buses.
In the event of failures the inverter converts the DC voltage
from batteries and feeds it to the Main AC supply bus. The
prototype block diagram developed as shown in fig 1,
developed for testing consists of a DC voltage bus operating at
28V, split into two voltage levels by means of a bulk capacitor
bank. The inverter implemented here is a three level diode
clamped inverter operating at a frequency of 400Hz. The
staircase output from the three level NPC inverter is then fed
to a Low pass LC filter. Output from the filter is stepped up to
115V by means of a three phase transformer operating at
400Hz; this voltage is then fed to a three phase RL load. In the
architecture of aircraft electrical system, the inverter output
voltage is fed to the AC bus of 115Vac rms, 400Hz, and the
aircraft AC loads are connected to this bus. The subsystems of
the complete prototype are described below.

Fig. 2. Single limb of the Diode clamped inverter

Fig. 1. Block Diagram of the experimental prototype set up
A. Three level diode clamped Inverter
The concept of multilevel inverters was introduced in 1975;
they are being used extensively in medium and high power
applications, as these allow usage of small ac filters, lesser
insulation requirements irrespective of additional series
connected devices, reduced insulation requirements in the step
up transformers feeding the AC bus [7][9][10]. A multilevel
converter that uses high frequency PWM switching has several
advantages when compared to a two level inverter. In general
for an N level diode clamped inverter, for each limb 2(N-1)
switching devices, (N-1) * (N-2) clamping diodes and (N-1) dc
link capacitors are required. The three level diode clamped
multilevel inverter consists of diodes in each limb which act as
clamping devices to clamp the dc bus voltage to achieve steps
in the output voltage. For the setup only a three level inverter
has been taken into consideration as higher number of levels
lead to higher switching losses.
The main component that distinguishes this topology from
two level inverters is the diodes D1 and D2. These diodes are
responsible for clamping the bus voltage and balancing the
capacitor voltage across the switches that are turned off. Diode
clamped inverters are preferred compared to other multilevel
inverter topologies due to the following reasons: [11]
• All the three phases share the same DC bus.
• For fundamental switching frequencies the efficiency
is higher.
B. PWM Control strategy
Advanced sinusoidal pulse width modulation technique is
employed for controlling the twelve switch inverter. In
advanced PWM techniques multiple high frequency carrier
waves are present. Phase disposition technique is the advanced
PWM technique used for the setup. In phase disposition (PD)
technique the high frequency carrier waveforms are in phase
with each other and are compared with the sinusoidal carrier
waveform. One carrier signal is placed above the zero
reference and another one is placed below the zero reference.
This technique is preferred as it has lesser harmonic distortion
on the line voltages. The pulses are generated from the
Hardware-in-the loop simulator. Sinusoidal generation is at
400Hz frequency and the carrier generation is at 10 KHz
frequency. Gating signal generated is shown in fig [3].

The switching sequence can be defined by the following

equations:

Fig. 3. Gating signals generated for a single switch
C. LC FILTER DESIGN
PWM generation usually injects harmonics in a chopped form;
harmonics in turn affect the loads like motors connected
causing heating losses and interference. A second order low
pass LC filter is designed to remove the undesirable
harmonics. The LC resonant tank circuit here is designed to
act as a low pass filter, consists of a capacitor and an inductor
to filter frequencies beyond the cutoff frequency. The cut off
frequency is set to 1.2 KHz and using the appropriate
equations, values of inductor and capacitor are determined.
The capacitor value is fixed and inductor value is determined.
This is because choosing smaller values of capacitors leads to
larger size of inductors. The cut off frequency of the filter is
given by the equation:
Fc = 1/ (2*pi*sqrt (LC)) (3)
The characteristic impedance of the filter is given by the
equation
Z = sqrt (L/C) (4)
As size plays an inevitable role, in the application chosen,
values of inductors are kept as small as possible to reduce the
size of the inductor and the number of turns that need to be
wound. Transfer function of the filter is determined and the
bode plot is obtained as shown in figure [4]. Inductor cores
and the number of turns to be wound are chosen based on
standard core size charts and AWG wire tables. The transfer
function of the LC low pass filter is given by
Vout/Vin = {(1/LC) / (s2+(R/L)s+ (1/LC))} (5)
Fig. 4. Phase and Magnitude plot of the Low pass filter
D. PI CONTROLLER
The main function of the controller is to maintain a desired
output voltage irrespective of the load change, and if the
reference set voltage is changed or varied, it needs to vary the
system parameters to adjust to the reference set voltage. A
Proportional Integral controller is used to control the output
voltage of the inverter with a desired response time. The RMS
output voltage is fed back and based on the error the gain of
the inverter is varied or adjusted such that appropriate gating
signals are generated and the output voltage is maintained
constant. The deviation of the error from zero determines the
response from the PI controller, to the inverter by proper
tuning of P and I values.
E. HARDWARE IN THE LOOP SIMULATOR
Hardware in-the loop simulation is a technique for developing
and testing complex real time embedded systems. Building a
physical prototype of a complex system, developing codes to
control the hardware and then testing it for all required aspects
is a tedious, time consuming and costly process. HIL’s
simulation is often used when developing a system that cannot
be tested easily, thoroughly and repeatedly in their operational
environments. [5] Hardware in the loop simulation requires
the development of a real time simulation model that models
some part of the system under test and all possible interactions
with its operational environment. In an aircraft electric system
due to the inherent complexity involved it becomes
increasingly difficult to build a physical prototype. As the
complexity of the hardware systems increases it becomes
equally tedious to develop embedded systems for controlling
the converters. In the experimental set up Simulink model was
developed and using RT Lab software, this software is
completely synchronized with Matlab- Simulink. The model is
run from the host computer which then communicates to the
Simulator which is an FPGA based simulator. The Simulink
model itself contains sections of code which have to be
generated into real time signals. The following figure below
illustrates the experimental set up.
 Fig. 7. Output Line to Line voltage from the diode clamped
Fig. 5. Block diagram of the HIL’s setup inverter

Gate signal generation and feedback control was carried out in

the simulator. Advantages of using an FPGA based system
when compared to a digital control techniques is that DSP’s
are usually application specific and cannot be used for
different devices. Also they are costly, cannot be reused for
multi –tasking. [8]

III. SIMULATION AND HARDWARE RESULTS

Simulations were done to verify the results of the proposed Fig. 8. FFT, Vdc = 28V, 400Hz, THD = 26.42%
back up system. The following figures show the simulation
results for the block diagram shown in Fig 1. The output
voltage across the load is controlled by varying the modulation
index. The PI controller is designed by determining the RMS
value of voltage and regulating the output by variation in the
modulation index. Gate signals for driving Mosfet switches
generated by the OPAL-RT simulator. Results obtained from
simulation are as follows:
• Fundamental Frequency-400Hz
• Input Voltage of the Inverter- 28V
• Modulation Index- 0.9(varying)
• Output Line to Line voltage- 28V (peak) Fig. 9. Filtered output voltage waveform with THD= 2.6%
• Output Voltage from LC Filter- 26V (peak)
• Output Voltage from Transformer- 115V

Fig. 10. Output from the controller

Fig. 6. Simulation circuit of the system
The following figures 7-10 show the simulation results
obtained. The fig 7 shows the output line to line voltage
obtained from the simulation results, the Total Harmonic
Distortion (THD) is determined and is shown in the fig 8.
A. EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS
For the experimental setup the Simulink model was developed
in Matlab- Simulink platform, it was integrated with RT-LAB
and the model was loaded into the HIL’s simulator. Gate
control signals for the Mosfet switches were generated in real
time from the simulator, these signals were then fed to an
Opto-coupler cum Mosfet driver IC, TLP350. The Opto circuit
was used as a protective measure to isolate between the HIL’s
simulator and the power Mosfet circuit.
For floating power supplies to the switches twelve different
transformer supplies were utilized. The details of components
selected for the development of the prototype are tabulated
below:
Mosfet switches- STP80NF12, with voltage capacity of 120V.
Schottky diode MOSPEC30C45C was selected for fast
switching and quick recovery.
Fig. 11. Developed prototype with Hil’s simulator
The figures 12- 15 show the outputs obtained from the
developed prototype. Figure 12 shows the gate pulses
generated from the Simulator..
Fig. 12. PWM pulses generated for a single leg of the inverter
With switching frequency 10kHz and dead time of 100ns.
Delay/dead time between pulses for turning on and off the
switches in each limb was generated using a delay block in the
Simulink model. The line to line voltage obtained from the
power circuit is shown below:
Fig. 13. Prototype output line to line voltage
Fig. 14. Filtered output Voltage of three level diode clamped
inverter
The results obtained from the developed prototype were in
close proximity with the simulation results. The total harmonic
distortion in the line to line voltages obtained from the
developed prototype is approximately 2.8%, from fig 14,
which closely converges with 2.6% THD of the simulation
results of fig 9.
IV. CONCLUSION
A Simulink model for a three level diode clamped inverter
operating at 400Hz frequency has been designed for aircraft
AC power supply ratings. A prototype of the three level diode
clamped inverter with a low pass filter has been developed
based on the Simulink model parameters. The gating signals
along with a closed loop feedback control for the inverter
power switches have been generated using Hardware in the
loop simulator. HIL's provides advantages like reduced cost
but also reduces the complexity of the system under evaluation
as it emulates in real time the behavior of the components
present in any system. The developed prototype results are in
close proximity with simulation results. These three phase
inverters can potentially replace the single phase inverters in
aircrafts due to their various advantages including higher
power capabilities. Future work involves integration of the
three level inverters to control the motors in electromechanical
actuators / electro hydrostatic actuators for flap angle control
and other applications in aircrafts.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors like to thank the Structural Technologies
division (STTD), National Aerospace laboratories for their
support and encouragement to carry out this project. We are
also grateful to Dr. Vanam Upendranath and Dr. Satish
Chandra for having provided us with the required Lab facilities
and for their support.

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