A Hierarchal Cascaded Multilevel Converter for uniform SOC battery management

This paper presents a Hierarchal Cascaded Multilevel Converter (HCMC) for continuous uniform SOC operation. The proposed HCMC has a hybrid structure of half-bridge converters and H-bridge converters and the voltage can be cascaded to reach a high level at two hierarchical levels: the half-bridge level and H-bridge level. The converter has the features of high voltage and high power application capability and modular design for cost reduction and reliability improvement. Continuous uniform SOC operation can be achieved via the proposed converter without adding additional balancing circuits. Simulation studies have been carried out to verify the performance of the proposed converter.