Improvement of LCC-HVDC Input-Output Characteristics using a VSC-MMC Structure

High voltage direct current(HVDC) systems has been an alternative method of a power transmission to replace high voltage alternate current(HVAC), which is a traditional AC transmission method. Due to technical limitations, Line commutate converter HVDC(LCC-HVDC) was mainly used. However, result from many structural problems of LCC-HVDC, the voltage source converter HVDC(VSC-HVDC) are studied and applied recently. In this paper, after analyzing the reactive power and output voltage ripple, which are the main problems of LCC-HVDC, the characteristics of each HVDC are summarized. Based on this result, a new LCC-HVDC structure is proposed by combining LCC-HVDC with the MMC structure, which is a representative VSC-HVDC topology. The proposed structure generates lower reactive power than the conventional method, and greatly reduces the 12th harmonic, a major component of output voltage ripple. In addition, it can be easily applied to the already installed LCC-HVDC. When the proposed method is applied, the control of the reactive power compensator becomes unnecessary, and there is an advantage that the cut-off frequency of the output DC filter can be designed smaller. The validity of the proposed LCC-HVDC is verified through simulation and experiments.