A Distributed Control Architecture for Cascaded H-Bridge Converter with Integrated Battery Energy Storage

Cascaded H-bridge topology has been used in grid-tied converters for battery energy storage system due to its modular structure. To fully utilize the converter's modularity, this article proposes a hierarchical distributed control architecture that consists of primary control, secondary control, and battery state-of-charge (SOC) balancing control. Primary control ensures accurate current tracking, whereas a distributed secondary control based on consensus algorithm is presented to regulate power sharing among modules and is proved to be stable theoretically. A distributed SOC balancing control is further introduced to improve energy efficiency of battery energy storage system. Finally, the hierarchical distributed control strategy is implemented using hardware controllers and a software platform. Besides, a carrier phase shift control is also implemented to achieve multilevel output voltage and harmonic reduction. The experimental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed control scheme effectively.