Study on Harmonic Production by Star-Channel Modular Multilevel Inverter using Various Modulation Techniques

This paper studies on the harmonic generation by an advanced type modular multilevel converter (MMC), namely star-channel MMC based inverter configuration. The comparative performances on harmonic generation of this converter are investigated by using different pulse width modulation (PWM) logics. The four different kinds of PWM technique are realized and used to control the star-channel MMC. Here, the four types of PWM methods are considered as phase shifted carrier (PSC) modulation, phase disposition (PD), phase opposition disposition (POD) and alternate phase opposition disposition (APOD) techniques. A particular combination of input voltage, load and switching frequency is taken for the system under different PWM case studies. The MATLAB-SIMULINK 2017a software is used for obtaining comparative performances among different modulation strategies in the simulation study.