Modified Staircase Modulation for Extending Unbalanced Loads Range of Cascaded H-bridge Rectifier

Zhang Guopeng and Wang Cong

School of Mechanical Electronic Information engineering China University of Mining and Technology (Beijing) Beijing, China hpoyz@163.com
AbstractIn this paper, the relations among the active power distribution, modulation wave and unbalanced loads range are analyzed. A maximum unbalanced loads range is proposed by modifying modulation waveforms under the unity power factor. And a modified staircase modulation, which is easy to realize, is proposed for a single-phase cascaded H-bridge multilevel rectifier to extend the range of unbalanced loads. The control method has been fully investigated with theoretical analysis, simulation with two cascaded H-bridges. Simulation results are presented to support this strategy. Keywords- Cascaded rectifier; voltage balance; modulation; unbalanced loads; restricted condition

Cheng Hong and Wang Shuo

School of Mechanical Electronic Information engineering China University of Mining and Technology (Beijing) Beijing, China wangc@cumtb.edu.cn more different from STATCOM and APF, there is more concern of controlling the active power and energy flow. The control of such a rectifier stage is a complex task characterized by a threefold goal: to satisfy AC-side unity power factor, to obtain satisfactory load voltage regulation and to reduce harmonics of system in the AC-side. In addition, it requires the balancing of the DC-link voltage for all the H-bridges to ensure high voltage application [10].

I.

INTRODUCTION

With the rapid development of socioeconomic and energy demand, there are more and more concerns on how to secure a clean sustainable and economic energy supply for the future. This leads to demands on building high power converters with more flexible, intelligent control and management of power flows in order to secure a unified stable converter, which interlinks different loads or power sources [1]-[5]. Following that trend, an advanced power converter without linefrequency transformer was proposed. Because of the cascaded H-bridge multilevel topology adopted in its rectifier stage, this advanced high power converter could be used between two different high-voltage systems without line-frequency transformer. The cascaded multilevel converter consists on series connected H-bridge units. Each H-bridge provides three voltage levels (+udc, 0, -udc). The number of levels that is possible to obtain at the output is m=2N+1, being N the number of H-bridges connected in series. The use of cascaded H-bridge structure allows reduced stress for semiconductor devices greatly reducing failures and significantly extending the life of the converter, allowing the use of optimized electrical machines and smaller filters and, consequently, cost reductions [6]. Nowadays, the advantages of cascaded H-bridge converter are well recognized for high power, medium voltage applications, such as STATCOM, high power drives inverter and active filter [7]-[9]. However, the rectifier stage is much
Supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (51077125); The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2009KJ02); The Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2010YJ03)

Figure 1. Topology of single phase of cascaded rectifier with two H-bridges

There have been many methods to balance DC-link voltages for cascaded H-bridges in the previous works. Reference [11] realizes the voltage balance by shifting modulation waveform to control the active power flowing into different H-bridges. But the cascaded H-bridge converter is mainly used for reactive power, and the shifting angles are limited. Reference [12] applies the energy based control scheme to balance DC-link voltages. The main disadvantage of this approach is the heavy computational burden, and current harmonic is not satisfied as shown in their experiments. Reference [13] has another grid connected to the DC-link capacitor of each H-bridge and to let them to exchange energy with the connected another grid when DC-link voltages are unbalanced. Although the DC-link voltage can be controlled independently, this method will raise hardware cost and complexity undoubtedly. All of these articles didnt analyze the unbalanced load range, which is very important to all kinds of balance control strategies. In this paper, unbalanced loads range of cascaded H-bridge rectifier would be considered, and the relation between

978-1-4577-0547-2/12/$31.00 2012 IEEE

modulation waves of different H-bridges and power flow would be analyzed. Based on this analysis, a modified staircase modulation is proposed to balance DC-link voltages and improve dynamic characteristics of the rectifier system. Meanwhile, the strategy can also extend unbalanced loads range for cascaded H-bridges rectifier. The proposed modulation strategy is verified by simulation. II. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION AND POWER ANALYSIS

PH 1 = U ao I s cos 1 = U ao _ active I s PH 2 = U bo I s cos 2 = U bo _ active I s

(6) (7)

A. Mathematical Model and Control Scheme of the System A single-phase two cell multilevel cascaded H-bridge rectifier is depicted in Fig. 1. The system is connected to the grid through a smoothing inductor L, and pure resistive loads R1 and R2 are connected to each DC-link capacitor C1 and C2 respectively. S1 and S2 are the continuous control signals, which represent the switching functions. The equations that describe the cascaded H-bridge rectifier behavior are well known and they have been reported in several previous works [14], the mathematical model of system can be approximated by following equations.

(8) PTotal = PH 1 + PH 2 In these equations, PH1 and PH2 are the active power absorbed by two cells respectively. PTotal indicates the total active power consumed by cascaded H-bridge rectifier. Uao, Ubo and IS are RMS values calculated from the fundamental harmonic value of each variable, and Uao_active and Ubo_active are projections of output voltages of two cells respectively. So the active power consumed by each of the H-bridge is determined only by the projection of the output voltage of each H-bridge.

1
2

Figure 3. Phasorial diagram of rectifier under unity power factor

uao = S1U dc1

(1)

(2) ubo = S 2U dc 2 di (3) L s = u s Rs is ucon dt du U (4) C1 dc1 = S1is dc1 dt R1 du U (5) C2 dc 2 = S 2is dc 2 dt R2 Because cascaded H-bridges flow same current on the ACside, DC-link voltages of H-bridges in series should be regulated as a whole. The sum of the udc1 and udc2 is usually controlled through the choice of the grid current amplitude. The grid current is controlled by calculating the multilevel rectifier AC-side voltage ucon. And the sum of the continuous switching functions S1+S2. can be obtained from the value of ucon /(udc1+udc2), here udc1and udc2 are capacitor voltage of the two H-bridges in series respectively. The correctness of the above control method has been proven [15]. This control scheme can be described in Fig. 2.

For a given total amount of power, relations of phase position among us, uL and ucon are determined under unity power factor, and the values of power that can be consumed in each cell cant be chosen freely. Fig. 4 (Left) shows the synthetic area for ucon to maintain the system stability [16]. It can be called the system stability area, or SSA. And O point is the modulation point of the rectifier system. However, the synthetic area will be changed when unbalanced loads are connected to different H-bridges. Ideally, stable operation of the rectifier is possible only if the input active power equals the power consumed by loads. In this case, the active power absorbed by capacitor is zero in average. When cells DC-link voltages become unbalanced, the voltage of the heavy load cell will drop, meanwhile the other one maybe rise. Sometimes, the two cells DC-link capacitor voltages couldnt be balanced even if the rectifier system works in SSA, and some balance control strategies are used. Because the deviations of the loads connected to different H-bridges are out of a limited range, there are some relations between the limited range and modulations for the two cells.

Figure 2. Control scheme of cascaded H-bridge rectifier with two cells

III.

EXAMPLE OF A FIGURE CAPTION. (FIGURE CAPTION)

Figure 4. (Left) Stable control area (Right) Three possibility regions for synthetic waveform ucon

A. Power Analysiss The phasorial diagram of cascaded H-bridge rectifier with two cells is shown in Fig. 3. The composed voltage ucon can be calculated through above control scheme. The active power for each H-bridge can be determined by the following equations:

A same analysis can be performed for loads increased or decreased, here only increased loads are analyzed. Suppose that, at a certain moment, R1 is suddenly increased leads to

Udc1>Udc2. There are three possibility regions for choosing O point for synthesizing ucon to maintain the system stability as shown in Fig. 4 (Right). Usually for reducing system harmonics, the DC-link reference voltage value of one cell must be smaller than the amplitude of Ucon. So DC-link voltages cant be rebalanced when the modulation point is chosen in space 1, for PH1>0 and PH2<0. When it works in space 2 and space 3, PH1>0 and PH2>0, various balance control strategies maybe work. There are very small ripples about DClink voltage after the system stabilizes, so the power consumed by DC-link capacitors can be ignored. And the values of Udc1 and Udc2 will be stabilized at Udc1T and Udc2T described by (9) and (10). The active power consumed by the two cells have to meet (11) and (12) to make DC-link voltages stabilized at the reference value Udc*. So the balance limited range of DC-link voltages can be got by (13).

to improve the unbalance loads range as shown in Fig. 5 (Right) O point can be chosen in B point as shown in Fig. 4 (Right) to extend the maximum unbalance loads range in this case.

U dc1T = ( PTotal PH 2 ) R1 U dc 2T = PH 2 R2 PH 2 R2 U PH 1 R1 U U bo _ active U ao _ active

* dc * dc

(9) (10) (11) (12) (13)

Figure 5. (Left) Staircase modulation proposed by [17] (Right) Modified staircase modulation for extending unbalance loads range.

IV.

SIMULATION AND RESULTS ANALYSIS

R1 R2

B. A Modified Modulation for Extending Unbalanced Loads Range From (13), to extend unbalanced loads range should adjust the projection values of output voltage of the two cells to control the active power flow. Still assuming Udc1>Udc2 and R1>R2, Ubo_active should be set as large as possible opposite to minimum Uao_active for the maximum range of unbalanced loads. Therefore, O point can be chosen in different synthetic areas in Fig. 4 (Right). In space 2, O point should be chosen at point A like Fig. 4 (Right), here Uao_active=UsUdc2 and Ubo_active=Udc2. And in space 3, O point should be chosen at the bottom point of SSA. Uao_active and Ubo_active can be expressed as (14) and (15), where is the angle between us and ucon.

U ao _ active = U dc1 cos((arccos(

2 2 2 U con + U dc 1 U dc 2 ) + )) 2U conU dc1

(14)

2 2 2 U con + U dc 2 U dc1 (15) )) 2U conU dc 2 Although this O point chosen method can maximize the unbalanced loads range, it also affects the reactive power distribution of the two cells indirectly, and makes H-bridge 1 consume the reactive power much more than H-bridge 2. This will lead some disadvantage results like amplifying the DClink voltage ripple, making the computation quite complex.

U bo _ active = U dc 2 cos( arccos(

Two cells of cascaded H-bridge rectifier, as shown in Fig.1, have been simulated using the Matlab-Simulink environment in order to test the effectiveness of the chosen control strategy. The electrical parameters are shown in Table. Different loads are set for the two cells, and R1 is changed from 100 to 500 at 0.6s. Fig. 6 shows dynamic characteristics of DC-link voltages using three different balance strategies. Fig 6 (a) and (b) show the balance strategy proposed by [15], which didnt think about the unbalance loads range, so there are more ripples of DC-link voltages when big unbalanced loads occur after 0.6s, and its output synthetic wave gets worse to inject more harmonics to the grid. The balances strategy proposed by [17] is shown as in Fig.6 (c) and (d) could be seen that the DC-link voltages of the two cells couldnt be rebalanced when big unbalanced loads occur after 0.6s, although the system can be stable and work under the unity power factor. That is because that the chosen O point has decided the maximum unbalanced loads range like above analysis, while unbalanced loads connected to the two cells are out of the range. The simulation results of the modified staircase modulation are shown in Fig 6 (e) and (f). It can be seen that this control method not only has good dynamic performance, such as the balance speed under different loads or the rebalance speed under big load ripple, but also extending unbalanced loads range for cascaded H-bridge rectifier system.
TABLE I. EXPERIMENTAL PARAMETERS Value 220V 10mH 200V 2200F 100 150 2K

Parameter Name Voltage source(us) Filter inductance(L) DC-link capacitor reference(Udc*) DC-link capacitor (C1=C2) DC-link loads (R1) DC-link loads (R2) Switch frequency

Reference [17] proposed a method to exchange the modulation waveforms of the two cells in every switch cycle to balance DC-link voltages. The modulation waveforms, whose phases are in the same direction like Fig. 3, are shown in Fig. 5 (Left). The method is simple and effective, but the modulation waveforms can not get the maximum unbalance loads range when uao and ubo are in the same direction. A modified modulation waveforms for the two cells can be used

250 200 150 100 50 0 -50 0 0.5 1 1.5

300 250 200 150 100 50 0 -50 0 0.5 1 1.5

300 250 200 150 100 50 0 0 0.5 1 1.5

500

600 400 200

600 400 200 0 -200 -400

0.54 0.56 0.58 0.6 0.62 0.64 0.66 0.68

0 -200 -400

-500

0.56

0.58

0.6

0.62

0.64

0.66

0.68

-600 0.52

-600 0.52

0.54

0.56

0.58

0.6

0.62

0.64

0.66

0.68

Figure 6. Dynamic characteristics of DC-link voltages and the output synthetic waves using three different balance strategies.

V.

CONCULUSION
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This paper has focused on the relations among the active power flow, modulation waves and unbalanced loads range. The single phase direct current overall control is adopted for the rectifier system. The modulation point chosen for the maximum unbalance loads range is proposed under the unity power factor. And a simple method by modifying staircase modulations is proposed to extending unbalanced loads range for cascade H-bridge rectifier. The good agreement simulation results indicate that the effectiveness of the proposed control method. REFERENCES
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