Selective Harmonic Elimination Technique Improvement for Cascaded H-Bridge Multilevel Converters Under DC Sources Uncertainty

Abstract

The performance of multilevel converters (MLCs) is at the risk of uncertainty of DC sources. This issue has a more negative effect on three-phase cascaded H-bridge MLCs (CHB-MLCs) due to more isolated DC sources. DC voltage variation can take place in all phases, but in this paper, the effect of DC voltage variation of one phase on line voltages is considered. This problem can lead to unbalanced line voltages and a lack of third harmonic elimination in a spontaneous way. Therefore, these problems cause to modify the formulation of quarter-wave symmetrical selective harmonic elimination (SHE) for three-phase CHB-MLCs so that the line voltages become resistant to DC voltage variations as well as mitigating third harmonic. To keep line voltages amplitude fixed under variation of DC voltages, it is necessary to take advantage of non-identical modulation indices to exploit the maximum capacity of DC voltages. Furthermore, regarding unequal DC voltages that can appear in numerous states in a phase, a new method based on the average of DC voltages (ADCV) per phase is employed in the formulation of SHE to reduce these states. Finally, both simulation and experimental results are presented to validate the performance of the proposed method.