Modulation Methods for Balancing the Capacitor Voltages of n-Level Diode-Clamped Converters

Diode-clamped converters (DCCs) suffer from the inherent capacitor voltage imbalance problem. Most software-based voltage-balancing methods fall into the space-vector-modulation (SVM) category and the carrier-based pulse-width-modulation (CB-PWM) category. Despite their effectiveness for the three-l...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on industrial electronics (1982) 2023-12, Vol.70 (12), p.1-10
Main Authors: Yuan, Huawei, Lam, Hin Sang, Beniwal, Neha, Pou, Josep, Hui, Shu-Yuen Ron
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
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Balancing
Capacitor voltage balance
Capacitors
Clamping
diode-clamped converter
Electric potential
Legged locomotion
modulation
multilevel converter
Pulse duration modulation
Pulse width modulation
Space vector modulation
Stability analysis
Support vector machines
Switches
Switching
Topology
Voltage
Voltage control
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Summary:Diode-clamped converters (DCCs) suffer from the inherent capacitor voltage imbalance problem. Most software-based voltage-balancing methods fall into the space-vector-modulation (SVM) category and the carrier-based pulse-width-modulation (CB-PWM) category. Despite their effectiveness for the three-level DCCs, it is not easy to extend them to a general n -level topology. In this paper, a new modulation method of a category called good-switching (GS) PWM is proposed for balancing the capacitor voltages. The proposed method requires no parameter-tuning effort and is extremely simple to design even for the n -level topology regardless of the number of phases. It is also potentially applicable to other multilevel converters. The principle, the implementation, and the stability analysis of GS-PWM are elaborated for a generic n -level DCC. A modified GS-PWM scheme and an on-off control scheme are proposed to reduce the switching transitions for further realizing the advantages of the GS-PWM. Particularly, the on-off control can be extended to many other voltage-balancing methods. Simulation and experiments with a five-level DCC validate the proposed methods.
ISSN:0278-0046
1557-9948
DOI:10.1109/TIE.2023.3239871