A Increased-Levels Model Predictive Control Method for Modular Multilevel Converter With Reduced Computation Burden

Model predictive control (MPC) is attractive for power electronic converters. How to reduce the computation burden is a main issue for MPC applied to modular multilevel converter (MMC). This paper proposes an increased-levels MPC (IL-MPC) method for MMC utilizing the $2\boldsymbol{N}+1$ output voltage levels to improve the THD performance. The ac side current, circulating current and submodule (SM) capacitor voltages can be effectively controlled by only considering some neighboring switching combinations with respect to their previous predictive step. Meanwhile, high $\boldsymbol{dv}/\boldsymbol{dt}$ of phase-leg voltage and output voltage are avoided. Effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by simulation results.