A New Capacitor Voltage Balancing Method for Trapezoidal Operation of Modular Multilevel DC-DC Converters

Saleh, Beeond M.; Costabeber, Alessandro; Watson, Alan; Tardelli, Francesco; Clare, Jon

Abstract

© 2019 EPE Association. In this paper, a new submodule (SM) capacitor voltage balancing algorithm is proposed for the trapezoidal operation of a Modular Multilevel DC-DC converter (MMC-DC-DC) for HVDC/MVDC. Trapezoidal wave-shaping leads to SM switching at fundamental frequency, making the balancing process more challenging. In the proposed method, balancing is achieved by controlling the equivalent duty-cycle of each SM. This control is made possible by the exploitation of the ramps in the trapezoidal voltage waveforms, that allow to impose an uneven power flow in the different SMs. The proposed balancing has been validated in PLECS simulation for a 10MW, 20kV 20kV MMC-DC-DC converter.

Citation

Saleh, B. M., Costabeber, A., Watson, A., Tardelli, F., & Clare, J. (2019). A New Capacitor Voltage Balancing Method for Trapezoidal Operation of Modular Multilevel DC-DC Converters. In 2019 21st European Conference on Power Electronics and Applications (EPE '19 ECCE Europe) (1-9). https://doi.org/10.23919/EPE.2019.8915177

• Conference Name: 2019 21st European Conference on Power Electronics and Applications (EPE '19 ECCE Europe)
• Conference Location: Genova, Italy
• Start Date: Sep 3, 2019
• End Date: Sep 5, 2019
• Acceptance Date: Mar 1, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Sep 5, 2019
• Publication Date: 2019-09
• Deposit Date: Mar 3, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 11, 2020
• Pages: 1-9
• Book Title: 2019 21st European Conference on Power Electronics and Applications (EPE '19 ECCE Europe)
• ISBN: 978-1-7281-2361-5
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.23919/EPE.2019.8915177
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/3660288
• Publisher URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8915177
• Additional Information: © 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.