Modeling and Control of Voltage Stress for Compact Multilevel Converters using a Predictive Approach

Compact Multilevel Converters (CMLCs) as an emerging class of bidirectional Multilevel Converters (MLCs) offer the best trade-off between components count and power quality. Nonetheless, reducing the conduction passes as well as using minimum semiconductor devices cause reliability issues and impose maintenance costs, as voltage stress degrades the performance and lifetime of the components. Accordingly, this paper introduces a novel predictive form of voltage stress for semiconductor devices used in CMLCs to address the related issues. In the end, verification results provided through a grid-connected nine-level Packed E-Cell converter demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed Voltage Stress-based Model Predictive Control (VSMPC) technique in dealing with voltage stress as well as tracking the other essential control objectives, simultaneously.