New flying capacitor multilevel converter

This paper proposes an improved version of conventional flying capacitor multilevel converter known as active flying capacitor converter. The proposed converter replaces the clamping capacitor of the three-level flying capacitor converter by number of series connected half or full bridge cells, and uses these active cells to generate multilevel voltage waveform at converter output. Additionally, this converter enjoys all the features of modular multilevel converters (M2C) such as operation independent of load power factor and modulation index, and can be extended to high number of levels without capacitor voltage balancing problem. Also, it requires reduced number of capacitor to generate the same number of voltage level per phase as M2C; therefore it may have small footprint.