Control System to Balance Internal Currents of a Multilevel Current-Source Inverter

AGUIRRE, MIGUEL PABLO; ANGELICO ENGELHARDT, MATHIAS; VALLA, MARIA INES; COSSUTTA, PABLO; AGUIRRE, MIGUEL PABLO; ANGELICO ENGELHARDT, MATHIAS; VALLA, MARIA INES; COSSUTTA, PABLO

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS

IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC

Lugar: New York; Año: 2017 p. 2280 - 2288

0278-0046

Multilevel Current Source Inverters (MCSI) have proved to be a high performance option for industrial applications due to reliability, fault tolerant capabilities, quasi soft switching and the use of lower filter capacitor values. One of its major challenges is to balance the internal currents that feed each module. Imbalances could be caused by manufacturing deviations of the reactive components, temperature drift or aging, nonlinear loads and modulation errors, among others. Using the well-known Phase Shift Carrier Sinusoidal Pulse Width Modulation (PSC-SPWM), a slight change in the amplitude of the carrier signals produces a variation in the average value of the internal currents. In this paper, we introduce a control strategy to balance the current of the inductors and its implementation in a prototype. Simulation and experimental results at different operating conditions show a robust behavior of the control system along with a low distortion in the output voltages and currents of the converter.