A novel voltage measurement technique for modular multilevel converter capacitors

In this paper a new voltage measurement technique for modular multilevel converter (MMC) capacitors is proposed. While all the capacitors voltages should be known for closed loop control of MMCs, only the arms voltages are measured employing the proposed method. Therefore, the number of voltage sensors reduced dramatically to one per arm. The capacitors voltage quantities are updated continuously using the arms voltage and the switching signals. Although the proposed method precision is depended on the equality of the capacitors, presented investigations show that the steady state error and even transient error in capacitors voltage estimation is ignorable for the proper operation of the converter.