Balancing the DC Bus Voltage of a Cascaded H-Bridge Converter with Adaptive Carrier Phase Shift Method

The cascaded H-bridge converter is one of the useful multilevel converters for high power applications. The unbalancing of cells DC bus voltages is a major issue in this topology especially when the capacitors are charged from the grid, which mainly is caused by the different losses of cells. In this paper a new method is proposed for balancing the cells DC bus voltages without need to measure the cells current. This method is named as “adaptive carrier phase shift”, which is based on the phase shift pulse width modulation. The balancing between the cells DC bus voltages is achieved by measuring the voltages and changing the carrier phase shift. This method is analyzed mathematically and is used to balance a 7-level cascaded H-bridge STATCOM. The feasibility and appropriate function of balancing method is investigated by the simulation studies in the MATLAB/Simulink software.