Optimized Reactive Power Control of Module Power Imbalance of Cascaded Converter

In the medium voltage cascaded converter, the power imbalance problem among the converter modules will result in certain converter modules over-modulated. Reactive power control (RPC) scheme is an effective way to balance the cascaded converters. Many efforts, such as reactive power sharing control and apparent power sharing control have been used to solve the overmodulation issue. This paper investigates an optimization RPC scheme to solve the overmodulation problem by minimizing the total required reactive power. An improved minimum reactive power (IMRP) RPC scheme is presented, the feasible area for the active power imbalance is evaluated and compared with the reactive power sharing control scheme and the apparent power sharing control scheme. Finally, the control scheme is verified on a three-module scaled-down cascaded inverter.