Journal of Power Electronics

The Korean Institute of Power Electronics (전력전자학회)
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A Fast Sorting Strategy Based on a Two-way Merge Sort for Balancing the Capacitor Voltages in Modular Multilevel Converters

  • Zhao, Fangzhou (State Key Laboratory of Electrical Insulation and Power Equipment, School of Electrical Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University) ;
  • Xiao, Guochun (State Key Laboratory of Electrical Insulation and Power Equipment, School of Electrical Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University) ;
  • Liu, Min (State Key Laboratory of Electrical Insulation and Power Equipment, School of Electrical Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University) ;
  • Yang, Daoshu (State Key Laboratory of Electrical Insulation and Power Equipment, School of Electrical Engineering, Xi'an Jiaotong University)
  • Received : 2016.09.11
  • Accepted : 2016.12.30
  • Published : 2017.03.20
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Abstract

The Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC) is particularly attractive for medium and high power applications such as High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) systems. In order to reach a high voltage, the number of cascaded submodules (SMs) is generally very large. Thus, in the applications with hundreds or even thousands of SMs such as MMC-HVDCs, the sorting algorithm of the conventional voltage balancing strategy is extremely slow. This complicates the controller design and increases the hardware cost tremendously. This paper presents a Two-Way Merge Sort (TWMS) strategy based on the prediction of the capacitor voltages under ideal conditions. It also proposes an innovative Insertion Sort Correction for the TWMS (ISC-TWMS) to solve issues in practical engineering under non-ideal conditions. The proposed sorting methods are combined with the features of the MMC-HVDC control strategy, which significantly accelerates the sorting process and reduces the implementation efforts. In comparison with the commonly used quicksort algorithm, it saves at least two-thirds of the sorting execution time in one arm with 100 SMs, and saves more with a higher number of SMs. A 501-level MMC-HVDC simulation model in PSCAD/EMTDC has been built to verify the validity of the proposed strategies. The fast speed and high efficiency of the algorithms are demonstrated by experiments with a DSP controller (TMS320F28335).

Keywords

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