Natural Balance of Multicell Converters: The General Case

By R. H. Wilkinson, Thierry A. Meynard, Hendrik du Toit Mouton. IEEE transactions on power electronics, 2006

286 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper focuses on the development of the natural balancing theory for the p-cell case. It describes the relationship between the models for different numbers of cells in a generic model for a p-cell multicell converter. The model discussed is based on the same principles that were used to develop the two-cell model in , except that the mathematics is much more involved. The same conclusions that were found to be true for the two-cell case was also found to be true for the general case of p cells. These conclusions include that the natural balancing mechanism of multicell converters depends on the overlap of the groups of harmonics of the switching function as well as on the load impedance. It will also be shown that the self-balancing mechanism ensures safe operation under most operating conditions where a high enough switching frequency is chosen and the load is not purely reactive. Two new aspects of the balancing theory were identified in the p-cell case: 1) for fixed duty-cycle modulation there exists certain values of the duty-cycle that causes the natural balancing mechanism to fail and 2) for p-cell converters the balance booster concept can be extended to a number of balance boosters tuned to multiples of the switching frequency. A "DesignTool" based on the balancing theory was developed to aid practicing engineers in designing multicell converters

Subfields: Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f0cdb0855221b239a26045cfc878b928d2514715

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Citations in the corpus

Comparison of 2.3-kV Medium-Voltage Multilevel Converters for Industrial Medium-Voltage Drives (2007, background): “The calculation of losses and the expense of power semiconductors, gate units, capacitors, and inductors at medium and high switching frequencies are the basis for the converter comparison.”
Multilevel Converters: An Enabling Technology for High-Power Applications (2009, background): “For the FC, the advantage of the even power distribution is that once the flying capacitors are properly charged (initialized to their corresponding values), no unbalance will be produced due to the self-balancing property of this topology [61], [149]; hence there is no need to control the dc-link v”
Analytical Modelling of Voltage Balance Dynamics for a Flying Capacitor Multilevel Converter (2007, background): “Analytic methods are an attractive alternative, but the approaches reported to date are hard to interpret and difficult to use [4][7].”