Voltage Balancing Strategy for mitigating capacitor ripple voltage in modular multilevel converter

The recent advancement in Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC) has made it applicable to high voltage applications. The important factor to consider for these types of power converters is balancing the floating capacitor. This paper proposes a voltage balancing strategy for balancing the capacitor in each submodule connected in the converter. Furthermore, the proposed method also mitigates the capacitor ripple voltage. Initially, the phase disposition carrier technique is applied for generating switching pulse for the switching devices, which are then modulated using voltage balancing strategy and then applied to the converter. Apart from balancing the capacitor, the proposed technique will mitigate the capacitor ripple voltage towards the permissible limit. The effective performance of the proposed balancing strategy is simulated using MATLAB/SIMULINK environment.