Optimal voltage balancing method for reduced switching power losses in stacked multicell converters

Abstract

This paper proposes a voltage balancing method for reduced switching power losses in stacked multicell converters (SMCs) based on optimal switching of power MOSFETs. In order to reduce the switching transitions of the power devices, only optimal transitions between consecutive voltage levels are used in the proposed method. By switching the power devices in the optimal manner most of the switching losses are reduced efficiently so that the overall performance of the proposed multilevel converter has been improved significantly. The proposed system has been simulated in MatLab 2015a and the simulation results show that the proposed system outperforms the system which uses non optimal switching.