Voltage-Balancing Method for Modular Multilevel Converters Under Phase-Shifted Carrier-Based Pulsewidth Modulation

The modular multilevel converter (MMC) becomes attractive for medium-or high-power applications because of the advantages of high modularity, availability, and power quality. One of the technical challenges associated with an MMC is the balancing of the capacitors' voltages. In this paper, a voltage-balancing control method is proposed for the MMC under phase-shifted carrier-based pulsewidth modulation. The proposed voltage-balancing method uses the linearization method for pulse sorting without arm current measurement, which can control the capacitor charge transfer to balance the capacitor voltage in the MMC. In the proposed method, the voltage-balancing algorithm is implemented in each carrier wave period, which reduces the computational intensity and burden. In addition, the arm current can also be improved with the proposed method. The simulation studies with the professional tool PSCAD/EMTDC are conducted, and a downscale MMC prototype is also tested with the proposed method. The study results show the effectiveness of the proposed voltage-balancing method.