Predictive Control for Multilevel Inverters with Reduced Number of Commutations

In this paper, a Model Predictive Control able to reduce the number of commutations is proposed for multilevel inverters. The strategy used in this work adds a term in the cost function, considering the number of changes in the output voltage levels to evaluate the number of switching commutations. This term allows to reduce the unnecessary commutations in a multilevel converter and also is able to reduce the computational cost involved in a multilevel converter with more than 5 output voltage levels. By means of simulation results, the strategy is compared to the standard Finite Control Set Model Predictive Control, FCS-MPC, considering as an example a 7-level Cascaded H-Bridge topology. The simulation results show the better performance of the proposed strategy.