Logic-Form-Equation-Based Active Capacitor Voltage Balancing Control Technique for Stacked Multicell Converters

This paper proposes a novel active capacitor voltage balancing technique for stacked multicell (SM) converters. The proposed active capacitor voltage balancing control method detects the direction of the load current and measures the voltage of flying capacitors (FCs) to generate a proper switching state in order to form the required output voltage level and regulate the FC voltages at their desired reference levels. The proposed active capacitor voltage balancing control technique can modulate the output voltage through any of the pulse-width-modulation (PWM) techniques such as the phase-shifted carrier PWM or the level-shifted-carrier PWM. The foremost advantage of the proposed active control technique is that it does not demand any complex computations because it is not based on the optimization of the FC voltage-deviation cost functions. A thorough set of simulation results and experimental measurements for the five-level and seven-level SM converters are provided to validate the proposed active capacitor voltage balancing control method.