Capacitor Voltage Balancing for Single-Phase Asymmetric Cascaded H-Bridge Inverters

This article presents an analysis of conventional single-phase cascaded H-bridge multilevel inverters composed of two and three cells. The dc-link can be a dc source or a floating capacitor. Two methods are given to regulate the floating capacitor voltage. In this way, according to the capacitor voltage balancing method used, operating regions and power distribution on the floating capacitor are presented for different dc-link voltage ratios and several ranges of modulation index and load power factor. A mathematical analysis is done in order to demonstrate the influence of the modulation index and load power factor over the power distribution. Finally, simulation and experimental results are provided to validate the theoretical considerations.