• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.1659-1669
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• 2018

An improved circulating current suppression control method is proposed in this paper. In the proposed controller, an outer loop of the average capacitor voltage control model is used to balance the sub-module capacitor voltage. Meanwhile, an individual voltage balance controller and an arm voltage balance controller are also used. The DC and harmonic components of the circulating current are separated using a low pass filter. Therefore, a multiple quasi-proportional-resonant (multi-quasi-PR) controller is introduced in the inner loop to eliminate the circulating harmonic current, which mainly contains second-order harmonic but also contains other high-order harmonics. In addition, the parameters of the multi-quasi-PR controller are designed in the discrete domain and an analysis of the stability characteristic is given in this paper. In addition, a simulation model of a three-phase MMC system is built in order to confirm the correctness and superiority of the proposed controller. Finally, experiment results are presented and compared. These results illustrate that the improved control method has good performance in suppressing circulating harmonic current and in balancing the capacitor voltage.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.1208-1217
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• 2019

The life-cycle prediction of the sub-module which is the unit system of MMC is very important from the viewpoint of maintenance and economic feasibility of HVDC system. However, the life-cycle prediction that considers only the type, number and combination of parts is a generalized result that does not take into account the operating condition of the sub-module, and may significantly differ from the life-cycle of the actual one. Therefore, we design a fault tree for the purpose of reflecting the operation characteristics of the full-bridge sub-module and apply the MIL-HDBK-217F to the failure rate of the basic event to predict the life-cycle of the full-bridge sub-module. It compares the life-cycle expectancy of the conventional failure rate analysis with the proposed fault-tree analysis and compares the lifetime according to whether the redundancy of the full-bridge sub-module is considered.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.23 no.4
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• pp.1218-1223
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• 2019

In HVDC systems, the full-bridge submodule increases the number of components compared to the half-bridge submodule, but the failure-rate can be reduced by securing 100 % redundancy. However, full-bridge submodules require more complex control algorithms to ensure the redundancy and to prevent arm-short with sufficient dead-time. To solve this problem, we analyse the failure-rate of the paralleled half-bridge configuration with the same number of components and 100 % redundancy as the full-bridge submodule. The fault tree analysis (FTA) method is applied to the conventional part failure analysis to reflect the operation risk of the submodule, thereby predicting the life-cycle of the submodule more accurately. To verify the validity, the failure-rate results of the proposed FTA based analysis method are compared with the failure rate obtained by the part failure method.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Power Electronics
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• v.20 no.6
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• pp.550-557
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• 2015

The Jeju Special Self-Governing Province is currently promoting the "Carbon-free Island by 2030" policy, which requires the use of renewable energy instead of fossil fuel so that the island will have no carbon gases generated by 2030. To implement this policy, the island plans to build a wind power plant capacity of 1.09 GW in 2020; this wind power plant is currently ongoing. However, when wind power output is greater than the power demand of the island, the stability of Jeju Island power system must be prepared for it because it can be a problem. Therefore, this study proposes a voltage source-type MMC-HVDC system linked to mainland Korea to expand the wind power penetration limits of Jeju Island under the stable operation of the Jeju Island power system. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, computer simulations using the PSCAD/EMTDC program are conducted, and the results are demonstrated. The scenarios of the computer simulation consist of two cases. First, the MMC-HVDC system is operated under variable wind power in the Jeju Island power system. Second, it is operated under the predicted Jeju Island power system in 2020.