Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Trends in Electronics and Informatics (ICOEI 2018)
IEEE Conference Record: # 42666; IEEE Xplore ISBN:978-1-5386-3570-4
Comparison of Total Harmonic Distortion of Modular
Multilevel Converter and Parallel Hybrid Modular
Multilevel Converter
Prabhat Mishra
Dept. of Electrical Engineering
G.H. Patel College of Engineering & Technology,
VV Nagar, India
prabhatm023@gmail.com
Abstract— Voltage Sourced Converters (VSC) are being used
in High Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) power transmission to
convert electrical power from AC to DC and vice versa and has
the significant proportion of future DC transmission schemes.
The converters have the ability to provide the connected AC
networks with “clean” real and reactive power without the need
for large passive harmonic filters, makes them attractive for
many applications where plant size and weight are important.
PHMMC and MMC both are the types of voltage source
converter. Both, PHMMC and MMC are considered as the
promising multilevel converter topologies especially in high
voltage applications such as HVDC transmission system.
Compared with the MMC, the Parallel hybrid MMCs can
potentially reduce the ratings of the converter components and
power losses. This paper discusses the comparison of the
performance of 9 level PHMMC and 4 level MMC, showing the
number of device count reduced in the PHMMC along with the
simulation model of the PHMMC and MMC.
Keywords—THD Comparison, Parallel Hybrid Modular
Multilevel Converter (PHMMC), High-Voltage Direct Current
(HVDC) Transmission, Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC)
NOMENCLATURE
VSC Voltage source converter
SM Submodule
MMC Modular multilevel converter
HVDC High voltage direct current converter
IGBT Insulated-gate bipolar transistor
PHMMC Parallel Hybrid MMC
THD Total Harmonic Distortion
I. INTRODUCTION
With the increased demand for electricity, we are
considering different methods of supply arrangement to
improve the security of electricity supply. Reliability and
Efficiency are the concern of any power transmission and to
achieve the same, Voltage Source Converter is the best option
for HVDC system, as it provides the feasible solution for
emerging challenges of existing overloaded AC networks at
high and extra high voltages [3]. Modular voltage source
converters have been identified to offer significant benefits
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Dr. Mukesh M. Bhesaniya
Dept. of Electrical Engineering
G.H. Patel College of Engineering & Technology,
VV Nagar, India
mukeshbhesaniya@gcet.ac.in
over existing HVDC systems based on Line commutated
converter including fast independent control of active and
reactive power, reduced station filtering requirements, less
semiconductor device stress, and the ability to inject power
into ‘weak´ networks [6].
In comparison with its predecessor, the PWM based
VSC; the modular scheme offers scalability, lowers the losses,
reduces EMI and lowers THD [6]. Modular voltage source
converter circuits are a promising new breed of voltage source
converters with solutions to most of the problems associated
with VSC-HVDC systems using two-level and three-level
converter circuits.
The paper focuses on the comparison of THD of
PHMMC and MMC. The THD in PHMMC is reduced as
compared to MMC which will be illustrated with a
PSCAD/EMDTC model.
II. MODULAR MULTILEVEL CONVERTER
The MMC is a type of Voltage Sourced Converter, thus the
overall theory and operation principles of the conventional
VSCs applies to it. The only diff erence is in the operation of
the MMC. The structure of the MMC allows each module to
operate individually, whereas, in traditional IGBT based
converters, the switches are connected in series and must be
gated simultaneously. The modular concept allows operation
even if some modules have failed. Failed modules can simply
be bypassed, and kept bypassed until it is possible to replace
them, and operation can continue. The DC bus voltage is then
divided among the remaining N−1 modules and normal
operation can continue. The MMC has multiple advantages
over previous types of converters such as [1] Modularity &
Scalability[2], [2] Very high number of levels, [3] Reduction
in the magnitude of the generated harmonics, [4] Lower
switching frequency of the individual levels, [5] Improved
reliability. For this paper, we will consider 4 submodules per
arm and further the system will have 8 submodules per phase.
A. Construction Of MMC
The MMC, as shown in Figure 2, consists of two arms per
phase leg where each arm comprises N series-connected,
nominally identical, Sub Modules (SMs), and a series
890
 Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Trends in Electronics and Informatics (ICOEI 2018)
IEEE Conference Record: # 42666; IEEE Xplore ISBN:978-1-5386-3570-4

inductor. In the case of the MMC, N modules are connected in bypassed by closing the lower IGBT. If the current is out of
series on either side of the AC connection point to form a the positive terminal the capacitor is bypassed by opening the
converter leg. The AC system is connected to the mid-point of upper IGBT (the lower diode ensures continuity).
the leg. Each half of this leg is called an arm of the converter.
C. Operation of MMC
Each arm has N number of series modules. These modules
consist of two IGBTs along with antiparallel diodes and a In an MMC, the energy of the DC bus is divided among
local capacitor as shown in Figure 1. The output voltage of a the capacitors of the individual modules rather being stored in
half-bridge SM is either equal to its capacitor voltage VC a single large capacitor, as it would be in a conventional VSC.
(switched on/inserted state) or zero (switched-off/bypassed The controls have to be designed to keep the voltage
state), depending on the switching states of the switch pairs, distribution as even as possible between the modules of an
i.e., S1 and S2 [10]. arm. The SMs, in each arm, are controlled so as to produce the
required ac phase voltage and the inductor suppresses the high
frequency components in the arm current. Only half the
modules are inserted in the system at any instant and the total
voltage across all the capacitors (inserted and bypassed) is
2VDC [10].
During regular operation, the current through each
converter arm has an AC component. As such the
instantaneous currents of the individual arms diff er. If the
instantaneous current at the AC connection point of the
Figure 1: Single module of an MMC converter converter is entering the converter and is divided between the
upper and lower arms to the DC side, the portion of this
current flowing through the upper arm will discharge the
SM1 SM1 SM1
capacitors of the inserted modules whereas the lower arms
Leg modules will be charged [1]. If the AC current direction is
SM2 SM2 SM2 reversed, the current will then be charging the upper arm
Arm modules and discharging the lower ones. Since the three AC
SM3 SM3 SM3
currents are phase-shifted, the charging and discharging
pattern is also displaced in time between the legs. Even if their
SMn SMn SMn average voltages over a cycle are the same, modules in one
converter leg will have a diff erent instantaneous voltage than
Ls Ls Ls in an adjacent leg.
Rs Rs Rs L R
a III. PARALLEL HYBRID MODULAR MULTILEVEL
VDC L b CONVERTER
L c
The parallel hybrid modular multilevel Converter
Ls Ls Ls (PHMMC) emerged as one of the converter topologies with an
efficient structure and low component count. The PHMMC is
Rs Rs Rs
one of the modular multilevel voltage source converter
SM1 SM1 SM1 composed of a Chainlink arrangement along with the H-
Bridge unit for each phase, to form a chainlink which
SM2 SM2 SM2 synthesizes the DC waveform to multilevel DC output. And
further, this synthesized dc waveform is unfolded to obtain the
SM3 SM3 SM3 AC waveform using the full bridge.
By using the converter chainlinks to synthesize the
SMn SMn SMn multilevel DC voltage, the series string of IGBTs in the H-
bridge arms which are in the main power path can be soft
Figure 2: Three phase MMC switched. This eff ectively reduces the switching loss and
simplifies the gate drive circuit design for the series string of
IGBT devices. The three converter chainlinks in the three
B. Operation of Submodules
phase converter arrangement are connected in cascade on the
The SMs are inserted or bypassed as required and has 4 modes DC side. To provide the isolation on the AC side, a
of operation. For insertion of the capacitor, when current is out transformer arrangement with isolated secondary windings
of the positive terminal, the capacitor is inserted by closing the should be used. The benefits of the use of these converters for
upper IGBT and if the current is out of the negative terminal, HVDC transmission include [1] fast and independent control
the capacitor is inserted by opening the lower IGBT (the upper of the active and reactive power exchanged with the utility
diode ensures continuity). For bypassing the capacitor, if the network [3], [2] low device count.
current is out of the negative terminal, the capacitor is

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 Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Trends in Electronics and Informatics (ICOEI 2018)
IEEE Conference Record: # 42666; IEEE Xplore ISBN:978-1-5386-3570-4

A. Construction Of PHMMC
Similar to the MMC, the PHMMC is composed of S1 VDC
S3
chainlink. The chainlink consists of the sub modules which are
S1,S4
connected in cascaded form, where modules can be inserted or DC
0
S2,S3
bypassed as required. Each SM of the PHMMC consists of a
-VDC
capacitor and a half-bridge circuit where its output voltage is
either equal to its capacitor voltage (SM switched on/inserted)
or zero (SM switched off/bypassed), depending on the
switching state. The chainlink is connected to the H-bridge/
full bridge converter, these H-bridge have 4 switches which Figure 4: Generation of three level voltage from an H-bridge using a
‘constant’ DC source
operate at the zero crossing of the multilevel DC voltage
source. A DC side inductor is used on the converter DC side to
In Figure 4, at the converter AC terminal, the three-
reduce the amount of distortion due to the characteristic
level voltage is obtained by using a ‘constant’ voltage source.
harmonics in the DC circuit. A transformer arrangement is
By making the ‘constant’ voltage source (VDC) in the standard
also used with isolated windings on the converter side and is
H-bridge converter behave as a multilevel DC voltage source,
considered to achieve phase isolation on the grid side.
a higher number of voltage levels can be synthesized at the
converter AC terminal as can be seen from the Figure 5. The
input across the H-bridge is Multilevel DC Voltage and the
same is unfolded to AC voltage at the output of H-bridge.
SM In principle, the series-connected SM string of each
S1 S3 phase represents a controllable voltage source, which is the
SM sum of the output voltages of the inserted SMs of phase. These
Vc
Vcl1 SMs are controlled by switching the Modules to achieve the
SM S2 S4 synthesized waveform. The full-bridge converter of each
phase operates with a fundamental frequency switching at the
SM zero voltage crossing [5]. Based on the rectified multilevel
L R
voltage waveform synthesized by the SM string, generates the
R
VDC Va’ desired ac-side voltage of the corresponding phase.
L R
Converter phase 2 L R
R S1 S3

Converter phase 3 DC

S2 S4
Figure 3: Three phase PHMMC

Figure 1 shows a schematic of a converter cell, the basic

building block of the converter chain link. The cell has two- Figure 5: Generation of multilevel voltage from an H-bridge using a
multilevel DC source
states VC or 0V, synthesized according to whether S2 is ON
(S1 is OFF) or S1 is ON (S2 is OFF). Under normal operating IV. CASE STUDY
conditions, order to avoid shoot through of the devices or in
To Analyses the THD performance of the MMC and
open circuit state the cells are operated in one of two states.
PHMMC, the simulation of same is carried out by using
B. Operation of PHMMC PSCAD/EMDTC. The values are based on trial and error
The main operation of the PHMMC is to provide method.
Table 1: Parameters for the MMC
multilevel voltage waveform from an H-bridge arrangement.
The converter chainlink formed from a number of half bridge VCAP 1900 μF
converter cells synthesizes a full wave rectified multilevel DC
Load R=50Ω, L=100mH
voltage. Multilevel AC voltage waveform is obtained by
‘unfolding’ the full wave rectified multilevel voltage, at the Number of Sub Modules 8
zero crossing instant [6]. Switching Frequency 1 kHz

Similar to the MMC, the local capacitor value of PHMMC cell

is kept at 1900μF. The modulation index is kept 1.

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 Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Trends in Electronics and Informatics (ICOEI 2018)
IEEE Conference Record: # 42666; IEEE Xplore ISBN:978-1-5386-3570-4

Table 2: Parameters for the PHMMC reduced and more number of levels can be achieved using
lesser number of SMs. The number of levels can be increased
VCAP 1900 μF to attain an AC voltage waveform by simply increasing the
Load R=50Ω, L=100mH number of sub modules.
Number of Sub Modules 4 THD performance for MMC is shown in figure 8.We
Switching Frequency 1 kHz can see that the THD is quite lower in the PHMMC as
Compared to MMC. The value of THD is 0.877413 in MMC
and 0.499647 in PHMMC.
A. Results
The voltage output across the MMC is having 5 levels it can 1.0
THD_MMC

be seen in Figure 6. The MMC has used 8 submodules to

achieve the 5 level output voltage. The number of devices
used are more as compared to PHMMC, hence, better control
over the operation of devices can be achieved in PHMMC
since the device count is low and the complexity is lower as
compared to MMC, for a higher number of levels. 0.0

[1] 0.877413

Figure 8: THD of Three phase MMC

THD_PHMMC
1.0

0.0

[1] 0.499647

Figure 9: THD of Three phase PHMMC

Individual harmonics can be seen in Figure 10, as 3rd

harmonics has higher magnitude due to which the THD in
MMC is quite higher as compared to PHMMC. We can notice
a reduction of harmonics in PHMMC and harmonics of higher
Figure 6: Output Voltage and Current of Three phase MMC
order can be noticed in PHMMC as is seen in Figure 11 which
can be easily suppressed by using Low pass filter.
In PHMMC, The Voltage across the RL Load or I_Thd_MMC
phase voltage is having 9-levels as can be seen in Figure 7. 1.0

0.0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 232...25 26 27 28 29 30 31

[1] 100.0

Figure 10: Individual Harmonic Distortion for MMC

I_THD_PHMMC
1.0

Figure 7: Output Voltage and Current of Three phase PHMMC

0.0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
The chainlink voltage is unfolded to form AC voltage using [1] 100.0

full bridge circuit. This conveys that the device count has been Figure 11: Individual Harmonic Distortion for PHMMC

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 Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Trends in Electronics and Informatics (ICOEI 2018)
IEEE Conference Record: # 42666; IEEE Xplore ISBN:978-1-5386-3570-4
V. CONCLUSION
It is discussed that operation of the PHMMC as a modular
VSC synthesizes multilevel voltage waveform from an H-
bridge unit. It has been confirmed that by having synthesized
multilevel DC voltage across the converter chainlink, the
converter arrangement can synthesize multilevel DC voltage
into AC at the zero crossing by ‘unfolding’ the multilevel
voltage waveform.
Figure 12: Comparison graph for THD of PHMMC and MMC
Further as we can see the module counts have reduced as
compared to MMC. As in MMC, modules used were 8 per
phase, to provide 5 level AC output as can be seen in Figure 6
and in PHMMC the modules used were 4 per phase, to provide
9 level. Total Harmonic Distortion is less in PHMMC as
compared to MMC results. And we can see that PHMMC gives
more number of levels with a lesser number of devices.
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