A comparison of phase disposition and phase shift PWM strategies for modular multilevel converters

Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC) has proved to be an effective solution for high power applications, supplying low distorted output voltage and high fault tolerance. This paper presents a detailed performance comparison between phase disposition PWM (PDPWM) and phase shift PWM (PSPWM) schemes under normal condition, over-modulation, as well as carrier non-synchronization condition. Compared to the PSPWM strategy, the PDPWM has smaller line-to-line voltage distortion under normal condition, when the carrier frequencies are adjusted to achieve the same number of switch transitions over one fundamental cycle. In addition, the capacitor voltages are able to keep balanced without additional controllers. Under over-modulation condition, PDPWM can still achieve smaller voltage distortion without capacitor voltage deviation, while obvious voltage differences are observed with PSPWM, which shows an opposite trend toward that of normal condition. Moreover, asynchronous carriers have different impacts on the harmonic cancellation, which needs to be carefully considered in a hardware implementation. Simulation results for a three-phase nine-level inverter system generated with the Matlab/Simulink software are provided to support the theoretical considerations.