• Journal of Power Electronics
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• 제12권5호
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• pp.739-747
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• 2012

This paper applies carrier phase shifted pulse-width modulation (CPS-PWM) to transformerless modular multilevel converters (MMC) to improve the output spectrum. Because the MMC topology is characterized by the double-star connection of six legs consisting of cascaded modular chopper cells with floating capacitors, the balance control of the DC-link capacitor voltage is essential for safe operation. This paper presents a leg-balancing control strategy to achieve DC-link voltage balance under all operating conditions. This strategy based on circulating current decoupling control focused on DC-link balancing between the upper and lower legs in each phase pair by considering the six legs as three independent phase-pairs. Experiments are implemented on a 100-V 3-kVA downscaled prototype. The experimental results show that the proposed leg-balancing control is both effective and practical.

• 대한전기학회논문지:전기기기및에너지변환시스템부문B
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• 제48권10호
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• pp.544-554
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• 1999

Multi-level inverters are now receiving widespread interest form the industrial drives for high power variable speed applications. Especially, for the high power variable speed applications, a diode clamped multi-level inverter has been widely used. However, it has the inherent problem that the voltage of the link capacitors fluctuates. This paper describes a voltage control scheme effectively to suppress the DC-link potential fluctuation for a diode clamped four-level inverter. The current to flow from/into the each link capacitor is analyzed and the operation limit is obtained when a conventional SVPWM is used. To overcome the operation limit, a modified carrier-based SVPWM is proposed. Various simulation and experiment results are presented to verify the proposed voltage control scheme for DC-link voltage balancing.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• 제3권4호
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• pp.205-214
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• 2003

This paper proposes a simple control strategy based on the discontinuous PWM (DPWM) to balance the DC-link voltage of three-level neutral-point-clamped (NPC) inverter at low modulation index. It introduces new DPWM methods in multi-level inverter and one of them is used for balancing the DC-link voltage. The current flowing in the neutral point of the DC-link causes the fluctuation of the DC-link voltage of the NPC inverter. The proposed DPWM method changes the path and duration time of the neutral point current, which makes the overall fluctuation of the DC-link voltage zero during a sampling time of the reference voltage vector. Therefore, by using the proposed strategy, the voltage of the DC-link can be balanced fairly well and the voltage ripple of the DC-link is also reduced significantly. Moreover, comparing with conventional methods which have to perform the complicated calculation, the proposed strategy is very simple. The validity of the proposed DPWM method is verified by the experiment.

• 전력전자학회논문지
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• 제22권3호
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• pp.256-262
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• 2017

This paper presents the control algorithm of a single-phase AC/DC/AC PWM converter for the linear compressor of a refrigerator. The AC/DC/AC converter consists of a full-bridge PWM converter for the control of the input power factor and a half-bridge PWM inverter for the control of the single-phase linear compressor. At the DC-link of this topology, two capacitors are connected in series. These DC-link voltages must be balanced for safe operation. Thus, a new control method of DC voltage balancing for the half-bridge PWM inverter is proposed. The balancing algorithm uses the Integral-Proportional controller and inserts the DC-offset current at the Proportional-Resonant current controller of the inverter to solve the DC-link unbalanced voltages between the two capacitors. The proposed algorithm can be easily implemented without much computation and additional hardware circuit. The usefulness of the proposed algorithm is verified through several experiments.

• 전력전자학회:학술대회논문집
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• 전력전자학회 2010년도 추계학술대회
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• pp.234-237
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• 2010

This paper proposes a balancing control of DC-link voltages of a H-bridge multilevel inverter for STATCOM application. Individual DC link voltage is controlled by simply adjusting the d-q voltage reference through a PI controller in each cell while the main controller carries out the reactive power control. The correctness and effectiveness of the method are validated by PSIM simulation with unbalanced load condition data taken from a typical arc furnace load, showing the adverse effects of load unbalance to DC link voltage significantly suppressed.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• 제16권6호
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• pp.2099-2108
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• 2016

The cascaded multilevel converter is widely adopted to medium/high voltage and high power electronic applications due to the small harmonic components of the output voltage and the facilitation of modularity. In this paper, the operation principle of a T-type H-bridge topology is investigated in detail, and a carrier phase shifted pulse width modulation (CPS-PWM) based control method is proposed for this topology. Taking a virtual five-level waveform achieved by a unipolar double frequency CPS-PWM as the output object, PWM signals of the T-type H-bridge can be obtained by reverse derivation according to its switching modes. In addition, a control method for the T-type H-bridge based cascaded multilevel converter is introduced. Then a single-phase T-type H-bridge cascaded multilevel static var generator (SVG) prototype is built, and a repetitive controller based compound current control strategy is designed with the DC-link voltage balancing control scheme analyzed. Finally, simulation and experimental results validate the correctness and feasibility of the proposed modulation method and control strategy for T-type H-bridge based cascaded multilevel converters.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• 제17권3호
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• pp.653-663
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• 2017

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.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• 제19권1호
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• pp.108-118
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• 2019

This paper proposes a DC-link voltage balance controller using the fourth-phase of a three-level neutral-point clamped (NPC) PWM converter with medium vector selection (MVS) PWM for common-mode voltage reduction. MVS PWM makes the voltage reference by synthesizing the voltage vectors that cannot generate common-mode voltage. This PWM method is effective for reducing the EMI noise emitted from converter systems. However, the DC-link voltage imbalance problem is caused by the use of limited voltage vectors. Therefore, in this paper, the effect of MVS PWM on the DC-link voltage of a three-level NPC converter is analyzed. Then a proportional-derivative (PD) controller for the DC-link voltage balance is designed from the DC-link modeling. In addition, feedforward compensation of the neutral point current is included in the proposed PD controller. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is verified by experimental results.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• 제14권6호
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• pp.1178-1188
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• 2014

This study proposes a finite-state model predictive controller to regulate the load current and balance the DC-link capacitor voltages of a four-leg neutral-point-clamped converter. The discrete-time model of the converter, DC-link, inductive filter, and load is used to predict the future behavior of the load currents and the DC-link capacitor voltages for all possible switching states. The switching state that minimizes the cost function is selected and directly applied to the converter. The cost function is defined to minimize the error between the predicted load currents and their references, as well as to balance the DC-link capacitor voltages. Moreover, the current regulation performance is improved by using a two-step prediction horizon. The feasibility of the proposed predictive control scheme for different references and loads is verified through real-time implementation on the basis of dSPACEDS1103.

• 전기학회논문지
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• 제65권2호
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• pp.311-318
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• 2016

This paper is a study on the neutral point voltage balancing of the three-phase 3-level T-type inverter using the predictive control techniques. Recently, multi-level inverter has been attracting attention as the advantages such as efficiency improving and harmonic reduction. Especially, the T-type inverter topology is advantageous in low DC-link voltage. However, in case of the prediction control, it takes a lot of time, because there exist 27 voltage vectors and it has to be calculated according to the respective voltage vectors. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a method to implement predictive control techniques while reducing the operation time. In order to reduce the operation time, the predictive control is implemented by using the minimum voltage vector except for the unnecessary voltage vector. The result of the implemented predictive control is added to the SPWM by using the offset voltage. It was verified through simulation and experimental results.