New Active Capacitor Voltage Balancing Method for Flying Capacitor Multicell Converter Based on Logic-Form-Equations

Abstract

This paper presents a new active capacitor voltage balancing control method for the flying capacitor multicell (FCM) converters which is fully implemented using logic-form equations. The proposed active capacitor voltage balancing control technique, measures output current and flying capacitor (FC) voltages to generate the switching states in order to produce the required output voltage level and to balance FCs’ voltages at their reference values. Output voltage of the FCM converter controlled with proposed active capacitor voltage balancing method can be modulated with any pulse width modulation (PWM) technique such as the phase-shifted-carrier PWM or level-shifted-carrier PWM. An advantage of the proposed active capacitor voltage balancing control method is its simplicity as it does not require any complex computations and tedious optimization calculations. Simulation results and experimental measurements of a three-cell four-level and four-cell five-level FCM converters are presented to verify the performance of the proposed active capacitor voltage balancing control technique.