TY - GEN
T1 - An efficient topology of modular-multilevel converter with alternative arm operation
AU - Nguyen, Thanh Hai
AU - Al Hosani, Khalifa
AU - El Moursi, Mohamed Shawky
AU - Al Sayari, Naji
N1 - Funding Information:
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT This publication was made possible by the support of the Advanced Power and Energy Center, APEC, Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, UAE. The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors. REFERENCES
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 IEEE.
PY - 2018/12/26
Y1 - 2018/12/26
N2 - In this paper, a new configuration of modular-multilevel converter (MMC) is proposed, which is the modified structure of the alternative-arm converter (AAC) with the improvements in terms of cost, loss, footprint, and device count. The proposed MMC also operates through alternatively conducting and blocking the upper and lower arms in a leg as the AAC, where a common stack of full-bridge submodules (FBSM) is shared for the upper and lower arms. This results in a reduction of the SM number in the converter leg, consequently for the whole MMC, from which the number of DC capacitors of the SMs is also reduced resulting in a significant reduction in cost and volume of the converter and improving the reliability of the converter. Extra active switches are required to control the common stack to operate with either the upper or lower arms. Furthermore, the proposed MMC also provides the fault-handling capability and reactive power compensation to the electric grid under the DC-cable short circuits. Simulation results for a 17-level MMC modeled by PSIM have been shown to verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme under normal operation and DC-fault conditions.
AB - In this paper, a new configuration of modular-multilevel converter (MMC) is proposed, which is the modified structure of the alternative-arm converter (AAC) with the improvements in terms of cost, loss, footprint, and device count. The proposed MMC also operates through alternatively conducting and blocking the upper and lower arms in a leg as the AAC, where a common stack of full-bridge submodules (FBSM) is shared for the upper and lower arms. This results in a reduction of the SM number in the converter leg, consequently for the whole MMC, from which the number of DC capacitors of the SMs is also reduced resulting in a significant reduction in cost and volume of the converter and improving the reliability of the converter. Extra active switches are required to control the common stack to operate with either the upper or lower arms. Furthermore, the proposed MMC also provides the fault-handling capability and reactive power compensation to the electric grid under the DC-cable short circuits. Simulation results for a 17-level MMC modeled by PSIM have been shown to verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme under normal operation and DC-fault conditions.
KW - Alternative-arm converter
KW - DC-cable faults
KW - FBSM
KW - Modular-multilevel converter
KW - Reactive power compensation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85061524675&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/IECON.2018.8591482
DO - 10.1109/IECON.2018.8591482
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85061524675
T3 - Proceedings: IECON 2018 - 44th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society
SP - 3915
EP - 3920
BT - Proceedings
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 44th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, IECON 2018
Y2 - 20 October 2018 through 23 October 2018
ER -