Performance Evaluation of Modular Multilevel Converters for Photovoltaic Systems

Sammanfattning: Modular Multilevel Converters (MMCs), over recent years, have gained popularity in high-voltage(HV) and medium-voltage (MV) applications due to their high reliability. Also, with the rapid growth of solar photovoltaics (PV) and energy storage systems, there is a high demand for efficient and reliable power converter solutions. Therefore, due to the seen merits behind MMCs, this thesis assesses their performance for low-voltage (LV) applications. This is accomplished by comparing basic MMC solutions with an equivalent flying capacitors based solution. Such comparison is based on the evaluation of the passive elements requirements, semi-conductor losses, area, voltage, and current stresses, and common-mode voltage. It is worth mentioning that the evaluation is based on utilizing LV MOSFETs. Furthermore, the thesis introduces a modulation scheme for the full-bridge submodule MMC, thus further exploring the different operating regions of the full-bridge based MMC.