A Harmonic Voltage Injection Based DC-Link Imbalance Compensation Technique for Single-Phase Three-Level Neutral-Point-Clamped (NPC) Inverters

In three-level neutral-point-clamped (NPC) inverters, the voltage imbalance problem between the upper and lower dc-link capacitors is one of the major concerns. This paper proposed a dc-link capacitor voltage balancing method where a common offset voltage was injected. The offset voltage consists of harmonic components and a voltage difference between the upper and the lower capacitors. Here, both the second-order harmonics and the half-wave of the second-order component were injected to compensate for the unbalanced voltage between the capacitors. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed voltage injection, the theoretical analyses, simulations, and experimental results are provided. Since the proposed method does not require any hardware modifications, it can be easily adapted. Both the simulations and the experiments validated that the voltage difference of the dc-link could be effectively reduced with the proposed method.