10.30486/mjee.2023.1970275.0

Asymmetrical Modular Multilevel Converter (A-MMC) with Mixed Cell Sub-Modules (SM) for Improved DC Fault Blocking Capability and Reduced Component Count

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  • Himanshu N Chaudhari1,
  • Pranav B Darji1,
  1. Electrical Engineering Department, SVNIT, Surat, India

Received: 2022-09-29

Accepted: 2022-12-15

Published in Issue 2023-03-15

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Chaudhari, H. N., & Darji, P. B. (2023). Asymmetrical Modular Multilevel Converter (A-MMC) with Mixed Cell Sub-Modules (SM) for Improved DC Fault Blocking Capability and Reduced Component Count. Majlesi Journal of Electrical Engineering, 17(1). https://doi.org/10.30486/mjee.2023.1970275.0
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Abstract

In this article, asymmetrical modular multilevel converter (A-MMC) topology using mixed cell (SM) with DC-side fault blocking capability and the reduced component count is proposed. The mixed cell submodule is made up of a full-bridge (FB-SM) and a half-bridge (HB-SM) with asymmetric capacitor voltage based on geometric propagation (GP) ratio. Each mixed cell submodule can generate a maximum of four output voltage levels with binary GP ratio and five output voltage levels with ternary GP ratio using six controlled switches and two asymmetric capacitors. The proposed A-MMC topology requires nearly half the number of components and voltage sensors compared to conventional topologies. This will result in simpler control structure of A-MMC with DC fault blocking capability. A voltage balancing algorithm based on normalization is used for capacitor voltage balancing and a hybrid pulse width modulation (H-PWM) technique to generate gating signals. Detailed operational concepts of the proposed topology, the pre-charging process of a capacitor, and performance with different modulation indexes are discussed in length. A detailed simulation model of A-MMC under different operating conditions is carried out using MATLAB/SIMULINK environment. To show the benefits of mixed cell SM, a comparison between the proposed mixed cell and other existing cells is presented in detail. The simulation results analysis show effectiveness of proposed schemes over other schemes presented in literature.

Keywords

  • Asymmetrical Modular Multilevel Converter (A-MMC),
  • HVDC system,
  • Hybrid modulation technique,
  • Mixed Cell,
  • Reduced Component Count. DC Fault Blocking Capability
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