Voltage fluctuation smoothing in the half-bridge cells of MMC for induction motor drives using recirculation currents SVM control

This paper presents a control technique for smoothing voltage oscillations in the sub-modules of Modular Multilevel Converter during start-up operations of high-power medium-voltage induction motor drive. At steady-state, the power fluctuations in each sub-module at fundamental and 2^nd harmonic frequencies generate capacitor voltage oscillations which are much higher as the current frequency decreases and tend to infinite at zero frequency. This is a problem in variable speed drives, where very low frequency values are needed during start-up. The control injects a homopolar component of the converter output voltage and an alternative high frequency circulating current, whose magnitude is much higher than the induction motor one during start-up operations. A space vector modulation technique is used in the control implementation. A numerical investigation is carried out with reference to some relevant cases-study in order to show the validity of the proposed control which allows an effective reduction of voltage oscillations on the dc-link capacitors of the different converter sub-modules.