Abstract
Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC) is an emerging and proven candidate for high and medium power applications. The submodule (SM) capacitor voltage balancing is crucial in MMC. Conventionally, continuous monitoring is required for voltage balance control. Therefore, the process complexity increases sharply with the higher number of SMs. This paper presents a voltage balancing method for the MMC based on nearest level control (NLC). The proposed method eliminates the dependency on expensive voltage and current measurements. It performs simple operations and derives the necessary switching patterns for any one of the arms. Also, the rank calculation at an individual voltage level is removed. In addition, MMCs can have sensorless voltage balance control with the complementary operation of upper and lower arms. To understand the process, a four-level MMC is studied and simulation results are presented to verify the proposed concept.
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