A Modular Multilevel Converter-Based Pulsed Electric Field Generator Design for Electroporation Applications

After a short historical background and mentioning common application areas and different clinical modalities of pulsed electric fields and the phenomena such as electro permeabilization and electroporation are introduced based on the concept of the basic mechanism. Subsequently, pulse generation (PG) and the adapted modular multilevel converter (MMC) topology that is to be covered are introduced including the operating principles and very basic analysis. Finally, performance of the proposed MMC with four half bridge submodules is tested on a prototype built in laboratory. A bidirectional voltage is produced with 80 V amplitude pulsating at 100 kHz operation frequency.