Battery pack state of charge balancing algorithm for cascaded H-Bridge multilevel converters

For most of the Multilevel Converter (MC) applications a commonly discussed issue is the maintenance of balance between the energy storage elements from the SubModules (SM). In applications where a battery pack is also part of the SM storage, such as STATCOMs or motor drives, the SM voltage is not in linear relation with the State Of Charge (SOC) of the entire battery; thus, the balancing becomes more cumbersome. A method to balance the SOC of the battery packs in a system using cascaded H-Bridge is proposed in this paper. The method uses nearest level control followed by sorting and selection based on the SOC of the battery packs. Based on the simulation results the number of switching is reduced considerably compared to the method where the phase shifted PWM is used. In addition, the time needed to achieve the balanced SOC is also reduced. The proposed method has been verified through experiments and simulations.