Soo Hyoung Lee

This paper proposes the partially-signed binary voltage control (PSBVC) method for hybrid modular multilevel converter (HMMC), which has the mixture of half-bridge submodules (HB-SMs) and full-bridge submodules (FB-SMs). With the proposed PSBVC method, the HMMC can generate a large number of voltage levels with much less SMs than the existing modular multilevel converter (MMC) by having different voltage values for each FB-SM. That is, all HB-SMs have the same voltage value of VDC/m, and their sum in an arm is the same as the DC-link voltage, VDC.