Capacitor voltage balancing in a neutral-point clamped multilevel dc-dc dual active bridge converter

Abstract

Neutral point clamped (NPC) multilevel inverter is being used for medium and high power applications since it can synthesize more voltage levels with smaller output voltage steps compared to two level full-bridge inverters. An NPC based multi-level dual-active bridge (ML-DAB) dc-dc converter has been proposed where the low voltage side consists a full-bridge producing a two-level voltage and the high voltage side has two three-level neutral point diode clamped (NPC) switching poles which produce a five-level voltage waveform across the high frequency transformer. Capacitor voltage unbalance has been an important concern for NPC topology. A neutral-point current control scheme has been proposed to control the imbalance between the capacitor voltages in the NPC side. Experimental results for steady-state operation and the capacitor voltage balancing control have been shown in simulation.