Active Voltage-balancing Control Methods for the Floating Capacitors and DC-link Capacitors of Five-level Active Neutral-Point-Clamped Converter

Abstract

Multilevel active neutral-point-clamped (ANPC) converter combines the advantages of three-level ANPC converter and multilevel flying capacitor (FC) converter. However, multilevel ANPC converter often suffers from capacitor voltage balancing problems. In order to solve the capacitor voltage balancing problems for five-level ANPC converter, phase-shifted pulse width modulation (PS-PWM) is used, which generally provides natural voltage balancing ability. However, the natural voltage balancing ability depends on the load conditions and converter parameters. In order to eliminate voltage deviations under steady-state and dynamic conditions, the active voltage-balancing control (AVBC) methods of floating capacitors and dc-link capacitors based on PS-PWM are proposed. First, the neutral-point current is regulated to balance the neutral-point voltage by injecting zero-sequence voltage. After that, the duty cycles of the redundant switch combinations are adjusted to balance the floating-capacitor voltages by introducing moderating variables for each of the phases. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed AVBC methods is verified by experimental results.