Designing An Open-Source Power Inverter (Part 23): Inverter Driver Design Refinement
by Dennis Feucht, Innovatia Laboratories, Cayo, Belize, How2Power Today, Jan 15 2025
Focus:
More involved electronic designs are straightforward for perhaps 95% of the project before
anomalous behavior is encountered on the bench. The final 5% of the project becomes a
research effort to find causes for unanticipated problems that can absorb 50% of the time
of the project. The Volksinverter design is no exception, and refinement of the design
work discussed in earlier parts of this series is necessary. In this installment, further
attention is given to the design of the inverter stage. Some errors are corrected in the
H-bridge circuitry by making adjustments to the bypass capacitance, changing the off-
biasing of the high-side driver for a better voltage margin, suggesting synchronization of
battery converter and the inverter switching cycles to reduce ripple current, and fixing
some problems with the gate-drive circuitry and the overcurrent protection circuitry.
Additionally, requirements are clarified for the ground-fault protection circuitry for the
case of larger inverter systems where common-mode currents pose a greater risk to inverter
operators.
What you’ll learn:
- How to improve voltage margin, reduce ripple current and improve gate drive and overcurrent protection in an inverter stage
- How to understand ground fault protection requirements for inverter systems based on power levels
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