Synchronization of the distributed PWM carrier waves for modular multilevel converters

The half-bridge modular multilevel converter has proven itself to be a suitable solution for HVDC application. In order to achieve high modularity and fault tolerance, distributed control strategy is one possible solution and is discussed in this paper. When distributed control strategy is used, there is a central controller and a local controller in each sub-module (SM). A problem appears when implementing the modulation using this type of control strategy; this is the lack of synchronization between the internal clocks of the different submodules controllers of the MMC. This will cause a drift between the PWM outputs of each sub-module increasing the total harmonic distortion of the output voltage. This paper presents a solution to synchronize the PWM outputs of the MMC submodules using EtherCAT communication protocol focusing on phase shifted PWM modulation technique.