A zero-voltage switching control strategy for dual half-bridge cascaded three-level DC/DC converter with balanced capacitor voltages

The input capacitors' voltages are unbalanced under the conventional control strategy in a dual half-bridge cascaded three-level (TL) DC/DC converter, which would affect the high voltage stresses on the capacitors. This paper proposes a pulse-wide modulation (PWM) strategy with two working modes for the dual half-bridge cascaded TL DC/DC converter, which can realize the zero-voltage switching (ZVS). More significantly, a capacitor voltage balance control is proposed by alternating the two working modes of the proposed ZVS PWM strategy, which can eliminate the voltage unbalance on the four input capacitors. Therefore, the proposed control strategy can improve the converter's performances in: 1) reducing the switching losses and noises of the power switches; and 2) reducing the voltage stresses on the input capacitors. Finally, the simulation results are conducted to verify the proposed control strategy.