Cascaded h-bridge: Improved model predictive control method for cascaded h-bridge multilevel inverters

Abstract

In this paper, an improved model predictive control (MPC) method is proposed, which reduces the amount of calculations caused by the increased number of candidate voltage vectors with the increased voltage level in multi-level inverters. When the conventional MPC method is used for multi-level inverters, all candidate voltage vectors are considered to predict the next-step current value. However, in the case that the sampling time is short, increased voltage level makes it difficult to consider the all candidate voltage vectors. In this paper, the improved MPC method which can get a fast transient response is proposed with a small amount of the computation by adding new candidate voltage vectors that are set to find the optimal vector. As a result, the proposed method shows faster transient response than the method that considers the adjacent vectors and reduces the computational burden compared to the method that considers the whole voltage vector. the performance of the proposed method is verified through simulations and experiments. © The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers.