Circulating Current Control of Modular Multilevel Converter With Reduced Conduction Loss for Medium-Voltage Applications

The modular multilevel converter (MMC) has become popular for medium-voltage applications. During MMC operation, unavoidable circulating currents flow through its arms and cause extra losses in the converter system. To generate a reference for circulating current, different current injection methods to control the circulating current have been reported. The conventional current injection techniques used so far relies on a mathematical model that excludes the effect of arm inductor voltages in its design. For high-voltage applications with many submodules (SMs), the above exclusion does not make much difference. But for medium-voltage applications with few SMs, the applied arm inductor voltages may be significant for a given dc-link voltage. In this article, inductor voltages are included in the proposed circulating current model, and a new reference for circulating current is obtained resulting in reduced circulating current through MMC arms. The proposed method is analyzed in detail on both seven-level and nine-level three-phase MMC, where advantages of the 2N + 1 level phase disposition pulsewidth modulation (PD-PWM) scheme are retained. The simulation study is carried out in PLECS blockset to show the reduction in the rms magnitude of circulating current. The validation of the proposed technique in a lab-scale hardware prototype shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Automated summary

This article proposes a new method to reduce circulating current in MMC by incorporating inductor voltages and obtaining a new reference for circulating current. This method effectively reduces circulating current through MMC arms without affecting the advantages of the PD-PWM scheme. Experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in a lab-scale hardware prototype.