Feedback control of three-Level PWM rectifier: Application to the stabilization of DC Voltages of five-level NPC active power filter

One of the most important drawbacks of the three phases five-level NPC (Neutral Point Clamped) Active Power Filter (APF) is the neutral point balance. As the consequence, the capacitors voltages of the input DC bus of the APF are not equal which constitutes the major limitation for the use of this power converter. In order to stabilize these DC voltages, it is proposed in this paper to study the cascade constituted by three phases three-level PWM rectifier-clamping bridge filter-five-level NPC APF. In the first part, the authors present a topology of five-level NPC Voltage Source Inverter (VSI), and then, they propose a model of this converter and its PWM control strategy. In the second part, the modeling and control of three-level PWM current rectifier is presented. In the third part, to remedy to instability problem of the input capacitors DC voltages of the APF, the authors propose feedback control of the three-level PWM rectifier followed by clamping bridge filter. After that, the sliding mode regulator used to control the active filter is developed. The obtained results are full of promise to use this topology of APF in high voltage and high power applications.