Open AccessBattery voltage equalisation using single‐phase cascaded H‐bridge converters
Author(s) -
Pirooz Ashkan,
Firouz Yousef,
Berecibar Maitane,
Van Mierlo Joeri
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
iet power electronics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.637
H-Index - 77
eISSN - 1755-4543
pISSN - 1755-4535
DOI - 10.1049/iet-pel.2020.0522
Subject(s) - converters , voltage , electronic engineering , controller (irrigation) , modular design , computer science , voltage drop , control theory (sociology) , h bridge , pulse width modulation , engineering , electrical engineering , control (management) , agronomy , artificial intelligence , biology , operating system
This research demonstrates modular battery storage systems' voltage balancing using cascaded H‐bridge (CHB) converters. The main principle is to maintain AC‐side high‐quality power absorption or injection, while on the DC‐side independent battery units' voltages get balanced. The CHB converter operates in inversion or rectification modes to discharge the storage system to an AC load/grid, or to charge it from an AC source, respectively. To achieve this goal, several challenges as high‐differential mode d v / d t , and dealing with semiconductors voltage drop also arise which should get tackled through feasible controller design. Model predictive control (MPC), as a flexible technique capable of multi‐parameter controlling, is used to achieve the beforementioned system objectives in a simple, efficient, and scalable manner. The proposed MPC‐based algorithm is an AC current controller, which handles DC‐side voltage equalisation and introduces adjacent CHB voltage levels to reduce d v / d t and performs switches voltage loss modelling all in a single control block. An additional linear controller based on multi‐carrier pulse width modulation is also implemented for comparison with the MPC‐based design. Experimental prototyping and simulation results validate the feasibility of this approach.