Control and Experiment of Pulsewidth-Modulated Modular Multilevel Converters .pdfVIP

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 24, NO. 7, JULY 2009 1737 Control and Experiment of Pulsewidth-Modulated Modular Multilevel Converters Makoto Hagiwara, Member, IEEE, and Hirofumi Akagi, Fellow, IEEE Abstract—A modular multilevel converter (MMC) is one of the next-generation multilevel converters intended for high- or medium-voltage power conversion without transformers. The MMC is based on cascade connection of multiple bidirectional chopper-cells per leg, thus requiring voltage-balancing control of the multiple floating dc capacitors. However, no paper has made an explicit discussion on voltage-balancing control with theoretical and experimental verifications. This paper deals with two types of pulsewidth-modulated modular multilevel converters (PWM- MMCs) with focus on their circuit configurations and voltage- balancing control. Combination of averaging and balancing con- trols enables the PWM-MMCs to achieve voltage balancing without any external circuit. The viability of the PWM-MMCs, as well as the effectiveness of the voltage-balancing control, is confirmed by simulation and experiment. Index Terms—Medium-voltage power conversion, multilevel converters, voltage-balancing control. I. INTRODUCTION IGH-POWER converters for utility applications require Hline-frequency transformers for the purpose of enhanc- ing their voltage or current rating [1]–[4]. The 80-MVA Static synchronous Compensator (STATCOM) commissioned in 2004 consists of 18 neutral-point-clamped (NPC) converter legs [4], where each of the ac sides is connected in series by the corre- sponding transformer. The use of line-frequency transformers,