Capacitor voltage balancing in multilevel flying capacitor inverters by rule-based switching pattern selection

A rule-based scheme is investigated for capacitor voltage balancing in a multilevel flying capacitor inverter (MFCI). Without using voltage feedback, the scheme determines the best switching pattern for maintaining nil mean current in all capacitors, hence minimising the capacitor voltage fluctuation. The method is developed to work with the selective harmonic elimination (SHE) technique for sinusoidal voltage generation applied to control static VAR compensators. The method has been designed using a four-cell five-level MFCI as an example. The selected pattern has been shown to give superior performance in load-voltage total-harmonies distortion level and mean capacitor voltage fluctuation. The method is validated experimentally for this form of MFCI.