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In this paper, the characteristics of ripple current of a multimegawatt drive system fed by a pulse-width modulation (PWM) inverter are investigated. Based on the investigation, a novel PWM scheme is devised to reduce the switching loss of the inverter under an identical amount of torque ripple of a motor. The proposed PWM is composed of two parts. The first is minimum torque ripple PWM (MTRPWM), which is optimized in terms of the minimum torque ripple in high modulation index (MI). The second determines the minimum switching frequency while holding the average torque ripple less than the allowable value under various operating conditions. It is termed reduced switching frequency PWM (RSFPWM). Consequently, by simply changing the PWM method from conventional fixed switching frequency continuous PWM to the proposed PWM, MTRPWM and RSFPWM, simulation results show that the switching loss of the inverter driving a 3.5 MW induction motor is reduced to 51.6% while keeping the torque ripple in the allowable boundary, where MI is 1.12. This approach is applied to small-scale experimental sets consisting of an interior permanent magnet synchronous machine (IPMSM) motor-generator set, and an induction machine MG set in an effort to verify the validity and feasibility of the proposed method. Based on these experimental results, the cost indexes of the IPMSM and the induction machine, as defined in this paper, decrease by up to 66% and 77%, respectively, when the proposed method is applied when MI is 1.12 compared with the outcome with the conventional PWM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]