Balancing control scheme of DC-link capacitor voltages for five-level hybrid T-type inverters without auxiliary circuit.

In this paper, a balancing control scheme of DC-link capacitor voltages for five-level hybrid T-type (5L-HT) inverters is proposed, where existing auxiliary balancing circuit is eliminated. The 5L-HT inverter has a significant advantage of the reduced number of devices compared with other five-level inverter topologies. However, this inverter requires an auxiliary balancing circuit, which is used to rectify the voltage imbalance at the DC-link capacitors, and thus negates the competitiveness of this topology in terms of device count and converter volume. To eliminate the auxiliary circuit, a carrier-overlapped PWM (COPWM) is applied in place of the conventional level-shifted PWM (LSPWM) to control the neutral-point currents, where the duty ratios of switches are adjusted by PI controllers. As a result, although the THD of the output voltage is rather increased, the cost and volume are saved by 27% and 52%, respectively, for a 1-MW/6.6-kV system. The effectiveness of the proposed balancing control method for the 5L-HT inverter has been verified through the simulation and experimental results for the prototype hardware. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]