A Medium-Voltage Motor Drive Based on Diode-Clamped Modular Multilevel Converters

摘要

Modular multilevel converters (MMC) have shown a great potential in the area of medium-voltage drives, for it can produce excellent output waveform with low average switching frequencies. A key issue of MMC is that it requires a complex voltage balancing method to balance the capacitor voltage of each submodule (SM). In this paper, a medium-voltage motor drive based on diode-clamped modular multilevel converter (DCM2C) is proposed. This topology is prominent in reducing voltage balancing control complexity by using a balancing branch between each SM to clamp the capacitor voltage.