Efficiency Evaluation of 800V Electric Vehicle Powertrain using Two-Level Voltage Source Inverter with different Modulation Techniques

Improving the inverter efficiency is important for electric vehicles (EVs) when tackling overall vehicle efficiency and increasing the driving range. This paper investigates the efficiency of an 800V EV propulsion system using an advanced modulation scheme called synchronous optimal pulse width modulation (SOP) and compares its performance to the conventional space vector modulation (SVM) scheme. A two-level voltage source inverter (VSI) using SiC power modules has been considered for benchmarking the effectiveness of the modulation schemes in terms of efficiency and performance. Earlier literatures has focused on efficiency comparison in a two-level voltage source inverter, but a detailed study of the modulation scheme called SOP is not well discussed. The impact of modulation schemes on the vehicle level has been analyzed using the Chevrolet Spark 2015 EV model in MATLAB/Simulink for different drive cycles. As a central evaluation criterion, this work examines the efficiency of a 1200V SiC traction inverter with a maximum output power of 350kW.