Abstract: In order to improve the controller’s dynamic responsibility and control accuracy of the single-phase three-level rectifier applied in China railways highspeed-2（CRH₂） electric multiple units（EMU）, firstly, a mathematical model of the rectifier in d-q axis synchronous rotating reference frame was shown, and a calculation method of the d-axis and q-axis components was presented. Secondly, the instantaneous power mathematic model of single phase threelevel rectifiers was discussed, and then a model predictive direct power control（MP-DPC） method embedded with direct current（DC） link capacitor voltage balancing was proposed, on the basis of this, a simple selection scheme of the switch sequence was adopted to reduce the algorithm complexity. Compared with the traditional proportional-integral-based direct power control（PI-based DPC） method with constant switching frequency, the proposed MP-DPC can improve the dynamic response of the rectifier, consider the influence of neutral point voltage balance on the instantaneous power, and be free of tuning and design the power inner loop PI controllers. Finally, the proposed MP-DPC and the traditional PI-based DPC schemes were compared and verified in hardware-in-loop experiment platform. The experimental results verify the validity of the proposed MP-DPC scheme.