DC-Link Capacitor Voltage Balancing Control of a Five-Level Regenerative AC Electronic Load Using One-Cycle Control

High voltage electric power equipment requires rigorous regulation testing to specific standards which ensure proper and safe operation in the grid. Manufacturers conduct these tests in order to prove standard compliance and product liability. Variable linear or nonlinear loads are necessary for testing medium voltage (MV) high power AC power converters. Generally, those AC power converters or power supplies require performance validation, burn-in and/or lifetime testing under different load conditions, defined by the end-user or standards for the given applications. For flexible and efficient MV verification testing, this paper presents a five-level multilevel converter-based MV regenerative AC electronic load with one-cycle control (OCC), which is based on five-level diode-clamped multilevel converters with back-to-back structure and can emulate any impedance load. In this paper, especially the dc-link capacitor voltage balance of the proposed multilevel MV regenerative AC load is deeply analyzed. Simulation and experimental results are presented to verify the dc-link voltage balance performance of the proposed multilevel MV regenerative AC electronic load.