Cascaded Multilevel Inverter Based Power and Signal Multiplex Transmission for Electric Vehicles

Power & signal multiplex transmission (P&SMT) is a technique that uses power electronic circuits for communication signal transmission. In this paper, a three-phase cascaded multilevel inverter-based P&S MT system is proposed. The proposed method can transmit communication signals without using a Controller Area Network bus, thereby reducing the wiring cost of the conventional electric vehicle (EV) communication system. The designed system can achieve motor speed regulation and battery balance discharging for EVs. With the combined pulse width modulation scheme and frequency shift keying method, both power and communication signals are transmitted successfully in a simulation model implemented in Matlab/Simulink. By evaluating the bit error rate of the transmitted signal, the maximum signal rate of the proposed system is determined as 600 bit/s.