• Journal of Power Electronics
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• 제18권6호
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• pp.1683-1696
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• 2018

Under the conventional control strategy, the asymmetry of arm impedances may result in the poor operating performance of modular multilevel converters (MMCs). For example, fundamental frequency oscillation and double frequency components may occur in the dc and ac sides, respectively; and submodule (SM) capacitor voltages among the arms may not be balanced. This study presents an enhanced control strategy to deal with these problems. A mathematical model of an MMC with asymmetric arm impedance is first established. The causes for the above phenomena are analyzed on the basis of the model. Subsequently, an enhanced current control with five integrated proportional integral resonant regulators is designed to protect the ac and dc terminal behavior of converters from asymmetric arm impedances. Furthermore, an enhanced capacitor voltage control is designed to balance the capacitor voltage among the arms with high efficiency and to decouple the ac side control, dc side control, and capacitor voltage balance control among the arms. The accuracy of the theoretical analysis and the effectiveness of the proposed enhanced control strategy are verified through simulation and experimental results.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• 제9권2호
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• pp.576-588
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• 2014

The superiority of CMI (Cascaded Multilevel Inverter) is unparalleled in high power and high voltage STATCOM (Static Synchronous Compensator). However, the parameters and operating conditions of each individual power unit composing the cascaded STATCOM differ from unit to unit, causing unit voltage disequilibrium on the DC side. This phenomenon seriously impairs the operation performance of STATCOM, and thus maintaining the DC voltage balance and stability becomes critical for cascaded STATCOM. This paper analyzes the case of voltage disequilibrium, combines the operation characteristics of the cascaded STATCOM, and proposes a new DC voltage control scheme with the advantages of good control performance and stability. This hierarchical control method uses software to achieve the total active power control and also uses chopper controllers to enable that the imbalance power can flow among the capacitors in order to keep DC capacitor voltages balance. The operating principle of the chopper controllers is analyzed and the implementation is presented. The major advantages of the proposed control strategy are that the number of PI regulators has been decreased remarkably and accordingly the blindness of system design and debugging also reduces obviously. The simulation reveals that the proposed control scheme can achieve the satisfactory control goals.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• 제12권5호
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• pp.739-747
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• 2012

This paper applies carrier phase shifted pulse-width modulation (CPS-PWM) to transformerless modular multilevel converters (MMC) to improve the output spectrum. Because the MMC topology is characterized by the double-star connection of six legs consisting of cascaded modular chopper cells with floating capacitors, the balance control of the DC-link capacitor voltage is essential for safe operation. This paper presents a leg-balancing control strategy to achieve DC-link voltage balance under all operating conditions. This strategy based on circulating current decoupling control focused on DC-link balancing between the upper and lower legs in each phase pair by considering the six legs as three independent phase-pairs. Experiments are implemented on a 100-V 3-kVA downscaled prototype. The experimental results show that the proposed leg-balancing control is both effective and practical.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• 제17권3호
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• pp.653-663
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• 2017

Multilevel active neutral-point-clamped (ANPC) converter combines the advantages of three-level ANPC converter and multilevel flying capacitor (FC) converter. However, multilevel ANPC converter often suffers from capacitor voltage balancing problems. In order to solve the capacitor voltage balancing problems for five-level ANPC converter, phase-shifted pulse width modulation (PS-PWM) is used, which generally provides natural voltage balancing ability. However, the natural voltage balancing ability depends on the load conditions and converter parameters. In order to eliminate voltage deviations under steady-state and dynamic conditions, the active voltage-balancing control (AVBC) methods of floating capacitors and dc-link capacitors based on PS-PWM are proposed. First, the neutral-point current is regulated to balance the neutral-point voltage by injecting zero-sequence voltage. After that, the duty cycles of the redundant switch combinations are adjusted to balance the floating-capacitor voltages by introducing moderating variables for each of the phases. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed AVBC methods is verified by experimental results.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• 제9권6호
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• pp.2224-2236
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• 2014

The performance of an isolated high voltage full bridge converter is improved using a voltage doubler. In a conventional high voltage full bridge converter, the diode of the transformer secondary voltage undergoes a voltage spike due to the leakage inductance of the transformer and the resonance occurring with the parasitic capacitance of the diode. In addition, in the phase shift control, conduction loss largely increases from the freewheeling mode because of the circulating current. The efficiency of the converter is thus reduced. However, in the proposed converter, the high voltage dual converter consists of a voltage doubler because the circulating current of the converter is reduced to increase efficiency. On the other hand, in the proposed converter, an input current is distributed when using parallel input / serial output and the output voltage can be doubled. However, the voltages in the 2 serial DC links might be unbalanced due to line impedance, passive and active components impedance, and sensor error. Considering these problems, DC injection is performed due to the complementary operations of half bridge inverters as well as the disadvantage of the unbalance in the DC link. Therefore, the serial output of the converter needs to control the balance of the algorithm. In this paper, the performance of the conventional converter is improved and a balance control algorithm is proposed for the proposed converter. Also, the system of the 1.5[kW] PCS is verified through an experiment examining the operation and stability.

• 전력전자학회논문지
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• 제24권2호
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• pp.120-126
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• 2019

This study proposes a neutral voltage balance control scheme for stable fault-tolerant operation of an active neutral point clamped (ANPC) inverter using carrier-based pulse width modulation. The proposed scheme maintains the neutral voltage balance by reconfiguring the switching combination and modulating the reference output voltage in order to solve the degradation of the output characteristic in the fault tolerant operation due to the fault of the power semiconductor switch constituting the ANPC inverter. The feasibility of the proposed control scheme is confirmed by HIL experiment using RT-BOX.

• 전력전자학회논문지
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• 제22권2호
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• pp.95-101
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• 2017

A simple and practical voltage balance method for a solid-state transformer (SST) is proposed to reduce the voltage difference of cascaded H-bridge converters. The tolerance device components in SST cause the imbalance problem of DC-link voltage in the H-bridge converter. The Max/Min algorithms of voltage balance controller are merged in the controller of an AC/DC rectifier to reduce the voltage difference. The DC-link voltage through each H-bridge converter can be balanced with the proposed control methods. The design and performance of the proposed SST are verified by experimental results using a 30 kW prototype.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• 제19권2호
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• pp.487-496
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• 2019

For a solid-state transformer (SST), some factors, such as signal delay, switching loss and differences in the system parameters, lead to unbalanced DC-link voltages among the cascaded H-bridges (CHB). With a control method implemented in the ${\alpha}{\beta}$ frame, the DC-link voltages are balanced, and the reactive power is equally distributed among all of the H-bridges. Based on the ${\alpha}{\beta}$ frame control, the system can achieve independent active current and reactive current control. In addition, the control method of the high-voltage stage is easy to implement without decoupling or a phase-locked loop. Furthermore, the method can eliminate additional current delays during transients and get the dynamic response rapidly without an imaginary current component. In order to carry out the controller design, the vector refactoring relations that are used to balance DC-link voltages are derived. Different strategies are discussed and simulated under the unbalanced load condition. Finally, a three-cell CHB rectifier is constructed to conduct further research, and the steady and transient experimental results verify the effectiveness and correctness of the proposed method.

• 대한전자공학회논문지SD
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• 제37권1호
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• pp.19-28
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• 2000

고장에 대한 강인성, 높은 출력 전류 특성 및 모듈화의 용이성 때문에 병렬 인버터 시스템은 그활용도가 점차 높아지고 있다. 이러한 병렬 인버터 시스템에서 전체 시스템 전력균형 제어는 주로 주파수 드롭과 전압 드룹 제어 또는 유효전력 과 무효전력 제어를 통하여 이루어지고 있다. 그러나 이러한 제어방법들은 시스템 변수 변동 및 부하변동에 따라 늦은제어 응답특성을 가지는 단점을 가지고 있다. 이러한 단점을 해결하기위해, 본논문에서는 병렬 인버터 시스템의 각모듈 출력전력을 균등화 시키는 새로운 제어기를 제안하였다. 제안한 제어기는 하드웨어 구현의 용이성, 피크전류 차단 기능들의 특성을 가진다. 또한 본논문에서는 제안한 제어기의 설계 절차를 기술하였으며, 여러 부하조건 및 시스템 파라미터 변동조건에 따라 순시전력균형제어기 동작 특성의 효용성을 컴퓨터 시뮬레이션 및 실험을 통하여 확인 하였다.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• 제16권3호
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• pp.925-935
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• 2016

This paper proposes a new interleaved double-input three-level Boost (DITLB) converter, which is composed of two boost converters indirectly in series. Thus, a high voltage gain, together with a low component stress and a small input current ripple due to the interleaved control scheme, is achieved. The operating principle of the DITLB converter under the individual supplying power (ISP) and simultaneous supplying power (SSP) mode is analyzed. In addition, closed-loop control strategies composed of a voltage-current loop and a voltage-balance loop, have been researched to make the converter operate steadily and to alleviate the neutral-point imbalance issue. Experimental results verify correctness and feasibility of the proposed topology and control strategies.