Voltage Balancing and Fluctuation-Suppression Methods of Floating Capacitors in a New Modular Multilevel Converter

Modular multilevel converter (MMC) is a newly emerging multilevel topology for high-voltage applications during recent years. In this paper, a new MMC is proposed, and the structure and operating principle are analyzed. Owing to the cascaded basic cells without multiwinding transformer, the voltage...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE transactions on industrial electronics (1982) Vol. 60; no. 5; pp. 1943 - 1954
Main Authors Wang, Kui, Li, Yongdong, Zheng, Zedong, Xu, Lie
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.05.2013
Subjects
Bridge circuits
Capacitors
Floating capacitor
Fluctuations
modular multilevel converter (MMC)
Pulse width modulation
Switches
Topology
voltage balancing
Voltage fluctuations
voltage-fluctuation suppression
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Summary:Modular multilevel converter (MMC) is a newly emerging multilevel topology for high-voltage applications during recent years. In this paper, a new MMC is proposed, and the structure and operating principle are analyzed. Owing to the cascaded basic cells without multiwinding transformer, the voltage balancing of floating capacitors must be considered. However, the voltage fluctuation also exists, and theoretical analysis indicates that the amplitude is inversely proportional to the fundamental frequency. This paper has proposed a voltage-fluctuation-suppression method which can reduce the amplitude of the voltage fluctuation in low-frequency region. It can also be used in motor driving with pump/blowerlike load at low frequency and improve the start-up performance significantly. A low-power three-phase five-level prototype is designed and built up to demonstrate the validity of this method.
ISSN:0278-0046
1557-9948
DOI:10.1109/TIE.2012.2201433