Low Cost Microcontroller based Experimental Setup to Study Sinusoidal Pulse Width Modulation for Multilevel Inverter

Traditional carrier-based Sinusoidal Pulse Width Modulation (SPWM) solutions for multilevel inverters, such as phase shifted and level shifted modulation, cannot be implemented on standard digital controllers as it requires many carrier waves. Single carrier based sinusoidal pulse width modulation is an alternative approach to realize SPWM for multilevel inverters and can be implemented on standard digital controllers. The implementation of single carrier sinusoidal pulse width modulation using a low-cost Arduino microcontroller along with multiplexer is discussed in this work. The experimental setup proposed in this paper is capable to examine the performance of sinusoidal pulse width modulation for any multilevel inverter. The proposed method can be easily extended for any multilevel inverter topology and any level. The hardware results obtained from two different multilevel inverter topologies validates its effectiveness.