Design and Control of Modular Multilevel Converter in an Active Front and Application

A proposed topology to operate as an Active Front End is the Modular Multilevel Converter. The Modular Multilevel Converter is a new solution in the field of medium and high power electronics. The converter's operation is based on the modular approach. It consists of modules, each one being a half-bridge connected in parallel to a capacitor. The special characteristic of this idea is that it is possible to build the sinusoidal waveform of the voltage by adding several modules in series in each phase-leg of the converter. An arm inductance is connected in series with the modules of every arm. In contrast to the two level voltage source converter, where the output phase voltage can be either plus or minus the half of the dc-link voltage, the MMC can change its output with steps equal to each module capacitor's voltage level.