A Novel Modulation Scheme and a DC-Link Voltage Balancing Control Strategy for T-Type H-Bridge Cascaded Multilevel Converters

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.