Analysis and Suppression of Conducted EMI Emission in

PWM inverter
Xuejun Pei, J im Xiong, Yong Kang and J im Chen, Senior Member, IEEE
Department of Electrical and Eleclronic Engineering,
Huazhong University of Science and Technology
W W , HUBEI PROVINCE, P. R. CHIhA (430074)
e-mail: ppei215@sohu.com
Abstmcf - This paper presents a study of conducted EMI
emission in Pu?M inverter complying with the EMC standard in
15Kb50MEz ranges. AU major circuit components including
switching IGBT, passive components and interconnects are
modeled in hi& frequency domain. Common mode and
diIferential mode switching noise together witb Ems filter
design and topology are the key aspects that have been
considered. In addition, the paper reports the conducted E M
measurements results for PWM inverter tbat have tamed to be
decisive in the reduction oi the conducted EM.
I. INTRODUCTION
The sizes of the energy storage elements (transformers,
inductors and capacitors) in switching mode power supplies
decrease approximately linearly with the increase of the
switching frequency. Therefore, high-density power supplies
generally demand high switching frequency and fast
semiconductor devices. However, the increased switching
frequency, together with the increased current and voltage
slew rates, h / d t and di/dt, has detrimental effects on the
electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) performance of the
power supplies. At the same time, EMI filters typically have
degraded attenuation due to parasitic elements at high
frequencies, and will he less effective in filtering out the high
lkquency EMI noises generated from the power circuits.
Commercial power supplies cannot be put on the market until
certain EMC regulations are met. In recent years, EMI
considerations have become increasingly important, as the
eleclromagnetic compatibility (EMC) regulations (typically
from lOKHz to 3 0 m ) have become more stringent.
Recently, a number of attempts have been reported to address
the theory analysis of EMI noises for PWM inverter [1,2].
However, the fundamental mechanisms by which the EMI
noises are excited and propagated have not been adequately
investigated. Thus, EMI noises, especially the common mode
current, flowing into the system ground via smy capacitors
have been studied.
Presently, passive filters are employed at the output of
voltage-source inverters to deal with EMI related issues.
Various types of filters configuration, based on inductor and
capacitors have hem proposed. For example, SUI, et. al., have
Granted by National Science Foundation of China
(50007004).
proposed a differential mode fdter referred to as a clamping
filter in [ 5] . However, the circuit is used to suppress the high
voltage gradient at its motor terminal. Ogaswara, et. al. have
proposed a circuit consisting mainly of complimentary
kansistors and a common mode transformer for achieving
active cancellation of common mode cment The active
circuits have some l i tati ons that Complimentary transistors
rated to 600V or higher are presently not available in the
market.
In t hi s paper, the inverter circuit model is conshucted with
important parasitic inductor and capacitor of major circuit
The fundamental mechanisms giving rise to common and
differential mode conducted emissions are analyzed. The
design methods of CM and DM filter are shown to reduce
EMI in PWM inverter. Experimental results obtained from a
7.5-KVA-laboratory system codinn the viability and
effectiveness of the passive EMI filter.
U. THE INVERTER MODEL WITH PARASITIC
ELEMENTS IN HIGH FREQUENCY
Fig. 1 shows the circuit of a full bridge IGBT based
inverter. The PWM inveaer is designed to have a rating
power of 7.5 KVA at 175-320V dc bus voltages. The rated
output voltage is 230V. The fundamental &equency
transformer with a tum ratio of 1:2.3 is used to match output
voltage. To simply the analysis the transformer is not drawn
in Fig.1. The switches TI-T4 are rated at 1200V/200A.
0-7803-78l7-uO31$17.W 02W3 IEEE 1787
Fig2 IGBT equivalent circuit withparasitic element8
For the purpose of EMI performance evaluation and
prediction, accurate inverter circuit models in high
fiequencies are needed. The models include device model,
filter model and interconnect model.
A. DtviceModel
Complete IGBT equivalent circuit is shown is Fi g2 In
addition to internal and external leads inductances, there are
also capacitances between IGBT collectors and the module
metal baseplate. These capacitances cause high frequency
leakage current flowing to the metal baseplate that is
connected to the heat sink. The heat sink is normally
grounded for safety reasons. The IGBT devices are mounted
on the metal base plate with a thin electrical insulating
material. To make the thermal resistance small, the insulating
layer is normally made as thin as possible and the stray
capacitance between the collector and the base plate tend to
be large.
B. Filter Model
The filter effect is dependent on not only the filter type but
LId
(a) 0-l -
c Rs
fo fl
also the difference between the filter component impedance
and the neighbor element impedance. In order to increase the
filter effect, the impedance of filter element and the neighbor
element impedance (either source or load impedance) must
make a lot of difference. For example, the smaller capacitor
impedance the filter has, the more noise current at high
frequency is bypassed. Similarly, the larger, inductor
impedance the filter has, the more noise voltage at high
frequency is divided. Unfortunately, the impedances of filter
in high frequencies are not the same as we think.
There are many effects of parasitic elements in filter
components. The effect of capacitor is discussed fmtly. A
simplified equivalent circuit is shown in Fig.3 (a). The
inductance L,, is refmed as the lead inductance and R, is
the equivalent resistor. The capacitors impedance magnitude
Bode plot is shown in Fig3 (b). The frequency f,
( fo =1 / ( 2 n m ) is the self-resonant frequency of the
capacitor. As the frequency increase fromdc, the impedance
of the capacitor C dominates and decreases linearly with -
2Odb/dec, at the frequency of f, , the serial LC combition
appears as a short circuit. Above the hquency fo , the
impedance of inductance dominates and increase linearly
with +2Odb/dec. Hence, the larger fo the capacitor has, the
smaller is the lead inductance, the better performance has the
capacitor for a fixed capacitor value. To improve the
performance of the capacitor, the capacitors leg should be as
short as possible. If the EMI is not reduced but increased after
exchanging a small capacitor with a larger one, the self-
resonant frequency is the main cause. Typical self-resonant
hquency is as follows: lKHz in electrolytic capacitors,
loOKHz in ceramic capacitors, lh4Hz in mylar capacitors,
loMHz in plastic capacitors and lOOh4Hz in mylar ceramic
capacitors.
The effects of the parasitic elements in inductors are also
great The typical equivalent circuit is shown in Fig.3 (c). The
C, and R , represent the parasitic capacitor and
equivalent serial resistance of the inductance, respectively.
The Bode plot of impedance magnitude is shown Fig3 (d).
The inductance appears as resistive below frequency f, ,
inductive above f, until fo ( fo = 1 / ( 2 n G ) ) and
capacitive above fo . Consequently, the larger fo , the
broader frequency band the inductor has. Similarly with the
capacitor, the smaller the parasitic capacitor value is, the
better performance the inductance has.
C. Interconnection Model
The interconnection includes wires and busbar. The wires
have lead inductance, which are about IUWm. The capacitor
behavior of the wire is not taken into account if the wire is
short, so the interconnecting wires are made as short as
possible. Seen fromthe experimental result, the parasitic
1788
capacitors of the input and output cables are considered when
the cables exceed 5m. Thebushan are used to connect the dc
power some to the two IGBT inverter legs. The. lead
inductance L of the busbars is small, but the Wdt is very
di
large. The L- has very large value, which is a main cause
dt
of differential modeemissions.
111. THE EM1 NOISE
The total EMI is composed of two components: the
differential mode and the common mode. The differential
modecurrent flows fromthe line to the neutral or fromthe
neutral to the lie. The wmmon current flows into the
parasitic capacitors between the power wnverter components
and protection earth. Thelevel of the common mode EMI is
usually higher than that of the differential mode due to the
input differential mode filter.
A. Differential Mode Emissions
High frequency differential mode current is induced by the
ahmpt voltage transition of output line-line voltage. The
differential mode currents flow on the output side of the
inverter whichever bridge leg is switched. Some of this
current flows through dc bus capacitor and some of which
can be drawn from dc power source due to the f ~t e
impedance of the capacitor. This differential mode current
can also bea source of radiated EM. Its propagation path can
bemodified using the differential mode filter that is installed
at dc bus near the inverter bridge.
The inverter input current i , is determined by the
switching state of inverter. Supposing the load current is
positive position and its value is i , when the load is inductive,
then the differential mode current can he determined by
considering three cases depicted in Table 1. The high
frequency current in the other cases is the same as the three
Besides, the high fresuency resonance may be formed due
to parasitic parameter of major circuit and the differential
mode current is increased. Furthermore, the high haxmonics
formed by P W M switches is most filtered out by output filter
but some of themare remained, then the differential mode
current is formed in outDut side.
CaseS.
B. Common Mode Emissions
Common mode emissions aredue to currents that flow
between the input phases and the earth of the system. In a
PWM inverter system, they are.piincipally due to the
combination of the rapidly switched inverter output voltages
and the various stray capacitances to earth at the output side
of the P W M inverter. There are parasitic capacitances
c, between IGBT collectors and the module metal baseplate,
which is indicated by the dashed line to ground in Fig.1.
These capacitances cause high fieequency leakage current
flowing to the metal baseplate that is connected to the heat
sink. The heat sink is normally grounded for safety reasons.
TheIGBT devices are mounted on the metal base plate with a
thin elecmcal insulating material. To make the thermal
resistance small, the insulating layer is normally made as thin
as possible and the stray capacitance between thecollector
and the base plate tend to be large.
Common mode voltage V, and V, in a single phase
inverter is the potential frombridge leg mid point to dc bus
point (ground). The parasitic capacitor is
c -I, (1)
- dvl dt
The common mode voltage charges and discharges the
equivalent parasitic capacitance in switching instant, thus
dv/df is large and common mode current is large. The
common mode current path is drawn by dashed Lie in Fig.1.
Clearly, loop areas for the common mode current are
relatively larger than those of differential mode current, and
thus act as good antennas for radiated EM.
C. VoItage Spikes
In a PWM inverter, a dc voltage is connected to the p5wer
electronics switches through busbars and produces the
desired output voltage. The simple circuit is shown in Fig.4.
For example, Fig.4 (a) shows the case where the voltage
across the load is V,, =V, . When the switch state changes
such that the load voltage is zero. the load current now only
passes through the loop 2 in Fig.4 (c). During the switch time,
Fig.4 (b), the current loop around loop 1 must go to zero. As
soan as TI starts to hun off, D2 t ums fully on (the load
current does not change due to the inductive load). Smce D,
is conductiug, the following equation is satisfied around loop
1 at the transition time:
Where L is the total stray inductance of loop 1 including
connection lead indudance, IGBT intemal inductance, V,, is
the voltage across switch T, . Thus, while T, is turning off
the stray inductance of the loop 1 will cause an over voltage
across switch TI based on (2). The voltage spikes in common
mode voltage is generated due to the t umoff of the power
switches, which increases the dvldt in switching time, then
the common mode current increases.
lJ89
MAD
i sv/itim onsteadystate
lV. THE MlTlGATION OF THE CONDUTED EMI
A general power filter is adopted in the PWM inverter to
simply the design. The low frequency parts (from15KHz to
I=) including DM and CM. The DM parts can be fdtered
out by DM filter and the CM filter cancels the low frequency
pam. The high frequency parts (above I-) are common
mode and are very difficult to remove; other methods are
adopted to cancel the common mode parts besides the
common mode fdter. Fig.5 shows the filter structure
CM DM
filter filter
I I
including DM and CM EMI filter in input side.
A. Design of DMFilfer
The inductance of CM filter is approximately short circuit
to the DM currents; moreover the leakage inductance of the
CM filter also contxibutes a lot to suppress DM EM. The
input DM filter is used to attenuate the dc ripple current from
the inverter bridge because the inverter bridge is a harmonic
source. The dc input current must be attenuated to lower limit
of the EMC standard. The inverter bridge input current
includes dc components and harmonic components of double
fundamental and switching frequency. The dc components
pass the differential filter without attenuation and the
harmonic current components is attenuated by the differential
filter greatly. Fig.6 shows the equivalent circuit for the
harmonic current. L and C are the equivalent inductance and
capacitor of the differential filter, respectively. R is the
equivalent serial resistor (ESR) of inductance L. V, is the dc
voltage that is short circuit for the harmonic current and 1, is
the equivalent harmonic cnrrent source fromioverters bridge
I i is the DM current after the differential filter. Fromthe
equivalent circuit, the equation is given:
(3)
h
I i =
S ~ L C +SRC +1
The fall slope is AOdbldec, which can meet the
requirement.
The max harmonic current is:
1790
(4)
I,,, =-3 lo x 2.3 =75.4
230
Therate value of inverter is 230V, 50Hz, 7.5 KVA.
Theneeded attenuation coefficient at ISKHz frequency is:
So the resonant frequency of the input DM filter must be
lower than 150Hz. The inductance and capacitance are
chosen as 1.2mH and 4700uF, respectively. The resonant
frequency is:
K >20lg75 i 120 - 83 =74dB
(5)
=67Hz (6)
B. Design of CMFilfer
Common mode current flow through the parasitic
distributed capacitors to protection earth during switching
transient. Since it is not practical to calculate the value of
common mode current, the design of CM filter is very
difficult. So we seleci the CM inductance as 0.4mH. the value
and sitnation of CM capacitor is adjusted by experiment. The
value of CM capacitor is selected as 0.luF fmtly. To improve
the systems performance at high frequency, the common
filter, RDC snubber circuit and shielding are used
C. Design of ourput Filter
the value of the capacitor is:
To compensate one thirds of the rate inductive load current
=lSOpF (7)
I, = 3 2 . 6 ~ 113
o x V,,
2z x 50 x 230
Hence, the capacitor value is decided as 150uF.
The resonant ffequency of the output DM filter should
500-600Hz, taking into account both the inverter output of
frequency of 50% and the carrier frequency of IOKHz. Thus
the inductance is selected as 0.5mH.
V. EMI MEASUREMENT AND EXPERIMENTS
RESULTS
Fig.7 (a) shows the waveformoutline of inverter input
current when the inductive load is connected, which has large
harmonic contents and strongly depends upon the operating
condition and modulation method. The expanding waveform
of inverter input current is also shown in Fig.7 (a). The
common mode voltage VI and common mode current are
shown in Fig.7 @). Fromthe Fig.7 @), the equivalent
parasitic capacitance c, is computed as about 48OpF. Fig.8
shows the voltage spikes of power switch TI .
A single-phase PWM inverter has been tested according to
the requirements of the Chinese EMC standards. As required,
a lie-impedance stabilizing network (LISNj is connected
between the dc power and the inverter systemto provide
stable source impedance to the inverter system in the
frequency range of I5KHz to SOMHZ. Conducted EMI
measurements are madeby observing the current across any
one of the LISN with a spectrum analyzer Agilent FAQOZB,
shown in Fig.9. As can be seen in Fig.10, the inverters
behavior at low frequency is pretty good. As can be noted,
..... ;l . . . . . . . . . . . . !.......... ..... ,....; . . . . . .
. . . .
..
. . .
. . . . . . . . . .
Fig.8 Voltage spike cm power switch T,
Chi 0.5Mdiv 5OUr. Ch2 50V/div; Time 5Wd i v
Chl lOM&v 5mr; Ch2 20Mdi v 25-
(a) (b)
Fig.7 High frequency current smenled by PWM i nv ens (a) lnvmer input o M m t (Chl: outbe
of inverter hput cunmt; chz: expanding waveform). (b) Common mode c-1 generated by
unnmon mode voltage (Chl: mmm~ll d e cumnt; Ch2: Camon mode voltage)
1791
- -
-
Fig.9 T& &-up lo n conducted EMI
Fig.10 Conducted E M emission in P W N in inverts
&e low frequency parts (up to 1MHz) of the noise spectrum
are madeof multiples of the switching frequency and mainly
differential noise. Its amplitude decreases with kl uency
thanks to the adopted differential mode filter, which validates
the accuracy of the differential mode filter design in turn.
Fromthe f ml spectrum shown in Fig.10, the high frequency
performances are also perfect because wmmon filter, RDC
snubber circuit and shielding ae used
VI. CONCLUSION
This paper has described the inverters behavior of high
frequency including DM and CM noise. The mechanismand
propagation paths of EMI noise are illustrated. The purpose
of the EMI filter is to eliminate both high kequency
differential mode and common mode noise kom the inverter
bridge m dc input and ac output sides. The effectiveness of
EMI filter has been verified by a 7.5 KVA laboratory system
and the EMC standard is met.
REFERENCES
[I] H. Zh, 1. -S. hi, and A. R Hefncr, 11, cl all., Analysis of m~&2led
EMI emissions from PWM inverter based DO empirical modsls and
comparative cxpcriments, in Proc. EEE PESC99, 1999, pp. 1121-
1133.
[2] c. Hua, c. S h q and G. Pa& Design of an input filter to supptss
conducted EMI of B single phase UPS inverts. in Roc IEEE IECON,
~~
1996,pp. 1699-1704.
131 F. Zan and G. F. Ldwich, Reduced layer planar busbar for voltape
source invcrten . in IEEE Trans. Power Electronics.. vol. 11, NO. 4,
1Uly 2002.
[4] M. C. Caponet, F. Fmhrmo, R W. D. Doncker, and A. Tmconi Low
sImy inductancc b u s h design and c o m~ d o n fM good EMC
performance in power clccmnics circuits, in IEEE T m . Power
ElstrOnics., vol. 17, NO. 2, March 2002.
S.I.Kim, and S. K SUI, A novel filter design for auppnssion of high
voltage We n t in voltage-fed PWM inverter, Rocccdingr of Applied
Power El setroni ~ Confcrrnee pp.122-127,1997.
[ 5]
1792