An improved snubber circuit with high efficiency and overvoltage clamping in three-level inverters

This paper presents a new high efficiency and overvoltage clamping snubber circuit for three-level inverters. The proposed snubber circuit with fewer components reduces a lot of the snubber loss compared with the conventional RCD snubber circuit. And it also has the superior ability for clamping the overvoltage at turn-off of switching devices. In addition, the blocking voltage unbalancing problem between the outer and inner switching devices does not occur. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate the validity of the proposed snubber circuit.