A simple method for capacitor voltages balancing of diode-clamped multilevel converters using space vector modulation

This paper presents a new and simple method for capacitor voltages balancing of an n-level diode-clamped multilevel converters using space vector modulation (SVM). The proposed method introduces a generalized approach to calculate dc-link capacitor currents without the use of look-up tables for an n-level diode-clamped converter. This approach balances dc-link capacitor voltages based on minimum energy property. The performance of the proposed method has been studied for a three-level, four-level and five-level diode-clamped converter in MATLAB/Simulink environment.