Abstract
This work presents a comparison of three different modulation techniques applied to modular multilevel converters (MMCs). The three modulation strategies studied in this paper are the phase-shifted sinusoidal pulse width modulation (PS-SPWM), the space-vector modulation (SVM) and the nearest level modulation (NLM). This paper focuses on analysing the particularities and implementation of each modulation technique. The modulation technique largely defines the generated harmonic content, making this is a key point that must be studied in depth. The paper briefly describes the three modulation techniques and analyses the harmonics generated by each one of the methods. In addition, the paper presents and compares the digital implementation of the three modulation methods in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The proposed approaches are validated using a real processing platform and experimentally evaluated in a real high-power six-level MMC.
Highlights
To achieve high-voltage and high-power conversion, conventional voltage source converters (VSCs)-High-voltage direct current (HVDC) systems were usually based on two-level or three-level converters with series-connected Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors (IGBTs), which suffer from high voltage sharing across each power semiconductor device and, in general, poor power quality [3]
In this paper a comparison between different modulation techniques used in modular multilevel converters (MMCs) has been presented
The paper briefly describes the three modulation strategies and presents how they are implemented in a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based digital processing platform
Summary
To achieve high-voltage and high-power conversion, conventional VSC-HVDC systems were usually based on two-level or three-level converters with series-connected Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors (IGBTs), which suffer from high voltage sharing across each power semiconductor device and, in general, poor power quality [3]. Multilevel converters (considering topologies of more than three levels) have received wide attention over the last few decades for various reasons, including their capability to manage high-voltage operation without series-connected switching devices, lower common-mode voltages, higher power quality and efficiency and the simple realization of redundancy [4,5]. In comparison with other topologies, MMC offers high modularity and scalability, transformerless operation, reduction of switching power losses and lower output filtering requirements [5,11]. The high number of possible switching states provides a wide range of choice in order to improve performance
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