
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 60, NO. 5, MAY 2013 1943
Voltage Balancing and Fluctuation-Suppression
Methods of Floating Capacitors in a
New Modular Multilevel Converter
Kui Wang, Member, IEEE, Yongdong Li, Member, IEEE, Zedong Zheng, Member, IEEE, and Lie Xu, Member, IEEE
Abstract—Modular multilevel converter (MMC) is a newly
emerging multilevel topology for high-voltage applications during
recent years. In this paper, a new MMC is proposed, and the
structure and operating principle are analyzed. Owing to the
cascaded basic cells without multiwinding transformer, the voltage
balancing of floating capacitors must be considered. However, the
voltage fluctuation also exists, and theoretical analysis indicates
that the amplitude is inversely proportional to the fundamen-
tal frequency. This paper has proposed a voltage-fluctuation-
suppression method which can reduce the amplitude of the voltage
fluctuation in low-frequency region. It can also be used in motor
driving with pump/blowerlike load at low frequency and improve
the start-up performance significantly. A low-power three-phase
five-level prototype is designed and built up to demonstrate the
validity of this method.
Index Terms—Floating capacitor, modular multilevel converter
(MMC), voltage balancing, voltage-fluctuation suppression.
I. INTRODUCTION
M
ULTILEVEL converters receive increasing attentions in
recent years due to the demands of high power and high
voltage in industrial applications [1]–[3]. Plenty of multilevel
topologies have been investigated, but only several of them are
practical for industrial applications [4]–[7]. Among the existing
multilevel converters, diode-clamped and cascaded H-bridge
(CHB) multilevel converters are the most widely used [8]–[14].
For medium-voltage (2.3, 3.3, and 4.16 kV) applications, three-
level neutral-point-clamped (NPC) topology is a good solution
[10], but some problems exist while extending NPC converter
to higher voltage levels, such as mass clamping diodes and
the voltage imbalance of dc-link capacitors [10]–[12]. For
applications with voltage higher than 6 kV, CHB multilevel
inverters are commonly used [10], [13], [14]. In this topology,
a lot of isolated voltage sources are required. To generate
separated voltage sources, conventional method is to employ
a multiwinding transformer with the same number of isolated
secondary windings, which is huge and expensive.
Manuscript received September 27, 2011; revised December 31, 2011 and
February 29, 2012; accepted May 9, 2012. Date of publication May 30, 2012;
date of current version January 30, 2013.
The authors are with the State Key Laboratory of Power System, Department
of Electrical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China (e-mail:
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIE.2012.2201433
Recently, a new multilevel topology gains more and more
attentions in high-voltage applications: modular multilevel con-
verter (MMC) [15]–[25]. It is first proposed by Marquardt and
Lesnicar [15] and is regarded as one of the next-generation
high-voltage multilevel converters without line-frequency
transformers [22]. The MMC is suitable for high-voltage power
conversion due to its modular structure, simple voltage scaling,
and common dc bus [15]–[17]. However, it also has some
drawbacks, such as voltage imbalance of floating capacitors and
acute voltage fluctuation at low frequency [19]–[25]. Reference
[21] proposed a stable voltage control method to realize both
averaging and balancing controls of floating capacitors. Refer-
ence [22] proposed a start-up method suitable for motor drive
with a pump/blowerlike load. These methods are all based on
phase-shift carrier pulsewidth modulation (PWM) (PS-PWM)
scheme. In order to suppress the low-frequency voltage fluc-
tuation directly, the concept of injecting high-frequency zero-
sequence voltage and circulating current is proposed in [23],
which can be used to start up induction motors (IMs) with
quadratic-torque loads. However, it only considers the dc and
fundamental components in the branch current and ignores the
second-order component, so the calculated circulating current
is very complex and contains two independent parts. What
is more, it does not discuss how to generate the three-phase
circulating currents.
This paper proposes a new MMC which connects the upper
and the lower bridges through a middle cell. In Section II, the
structure and operating principles of the new MMC will be
discussed first. Section III presents the modulation scheme and
voltage balancing method of the new MMC. In Section IV,
the voltage fluctuation is studied by theoretical analysis, and
a voltage-fluctuation-suppression method is proposed. Exper-
imental results with both R−L load and IM load are pre-
sented in Section V, and finally, conclusions are summarized in
Section VI.
II. S
TRUCTURE AND OPERATING PRINCIPLES
Reference [5] proposed a generalized multilevel inverter,
which is regarded as the most complicated and comprehensive
multilevel topology. Ithas been found that the existing multilevel
inverters such as diode-clamped, flying-capacitor, and CHB mul-
tilevel inverters can all be derived from the generalized inverter
topology [5]–[7]. Moreover, obeying some particular rules,
more topologies can be derived from it. Therefore, it provides a
systematic method to study the new multilevel topologies.
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