Abstruct-This paper presents a new multilevel converter topology suitable for very high voltage applications, especially network interties in power generation and transmission. The fundamental concept and the applied control scheme is introduced. Simulation results of a 36MW-network intertie illustrate the efficient operating characteristics. A suitable structure of the converter-control is proposed.

Battery electric vehicles demand a wide variety of charging networks, such as charging stations and wallboxes, to be set up in the future. The high charging power (typically in the range of a couple of kW up to a couple of hundred kW) and the possibly long duration of the charging process (up to more than 24h) put some special requirements on the electrical infrastructure of charging stations, sockets, and plugs. This paper gives an overview of the technical design requirements and considerations for vehicle charging stations, sockets, and plugs, including their infrastructure, according to the Swedish Standard 4364000, “Low-voltage electrical installations—Rules for design and erection of electrical installations”, and the corresponding harmonized European standards. In detail, the four internationally categorized charging modes are explained and the preferable charging plugs, including their two-bus communication, according to European Directives are shown. The dimensioning of the supply lines and the proper selection of the overcurrent protection device, the insulation monitor, and the residual current device are described. Furthermore, a comprehensive overview of the required safety measures, such as the application of an isolation transformer or the implementation of an overvoltage protection mechanism, and the limits for conducted electromagnetic emissions, such as low-frequency harmonics or high-frequency (150 kHz to 108 MHz) emissions, are given.

This paper shows two approaches to determine the battery impedance of battery cells or battery modules when used in a reconfigurable battery system (RBS) or in any type of modular multilevel converter (MMC) for electric drive applications. A generic battery model is used and the concepts of the recursive time and frequency-domain parameter extraction, using a current step and an electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, are explained. Thus, it is shown and demonstrated that the balancing current of neighboring cells/modules ,when in parallel operation, can be used, similar to the time-domain parameter extraction utilizing a current step, to determine the battery parameters. Furthermore, it is shown and demonstrated that a part of the inverter can be used as variable AC voltage source to control a sinusoidal current through the motor inductances of the drive train, which can be injected to the inserted battery cells/modules of an adjacent phase to perform an on-board impedance spectroscopy. Using either of the two presented approaches, the individual battery impedances can be easily determined, yielding the state of health (SOH) and the power capability of individual battery cells/modules. Nonetheless, the analyzed approaches were just considered to be applied at machine standstill, which is not suitable for grid-tied applications.

The battery-based multilevel inverter has grown in popularity due to its ability to boost a system’s safety while increasing the effective battery life. Nevertheless, the system’s high degree of freedom, induced by a large number of switches, provides difficulties. In the past, central computation systems that needed extensive communication between the master and the slave module on each cell were presented as a solution for running such a system. However, because of the enormous number of slaves, the bus system created a bottleneck during operation. As an alternative to conventional multilevel inverter systems, which rely on a master–slave architecture for communication, decentralized controllers represent a feasible solution for communication capacity constraints. These controllers operate autonomously, depending on local measurements and decision-making. With this approach, it is possible to reduce the load on the bus system by approximately 90 percent and to enable a balanced state of charge throughout the system with an absolute maximum standard deviation of 1.1×10−5. This strategy results in a more reliable and versatile multilevel inverter system, while the load on the bus system is reduced and more precise switching instructions are enabled.

This paper presents a novel capacitor voltage balancing control approach for cascaded multilevel inverters with an arbitrary number of series-connected H-Bridge modules (floating capacitor modules) with asymmetric voltages, tiered by a factor of two (binary asymmetric). Using a nearest-level reference waveform, the balancing approach uses a one-step-ahead approach to find the optimal switching-state combination among all redundant switching-state combinations to balance the capacitor voltages as quickly as possible. Moreover, using a Lyapunov function candidate and considering LaSalle’s invariance principle, it is shown that an offline calculated trajectory of optimal switching-state combinations for each discrete output voltage level can be used to operate (asymptotically stable) the inverter without measuring any of the capacitor voltages, achieving a novel sensorless control as well. To verify the stability of the one-step-ahead balancing approach and its sensorless variant, a demonstrator inverter with 33 levels is operated in grid-tied mode. For the chosen 33-level converter, the NPC main-stage and the individual H-bridge modules are operated with an individual switching frequency of about 1 kHz and 2 kHz, respectively. The sensorless approach slightly reduced the dynamic system response and, furthermore, the current THD for the chosen operating point was increased from 3.28 to 4.58 in comparison with that of using the capacitor voltage feedback.