Reactive power and harmonics compensation with Multilevel Cascade Converter

This article presents the application of the Multilevel Cascade Inverter for reactive power and harmonics compensation. In this case, since the converter does not deliver active power to the load, it is possible to operate without DC sources that are substituted by capacitors. The challenge is to balance the voltages that tend to displace due to the asymmetric current waveform (harmonics compensation) and load transients. The paper provides some explanations concerning the phenomena that produce voltage unbalance and proposes an algorithm for balancing the voltage by swapping the H-bridge cells for producing the desired output voltage.