• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.830-840
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• 2015

The H-bridge inverter is the fundamental power cell of the cascaded distribution static synchronous compensator (DSTATCOM). Thus, cell reliability is important to the compensation performance and stability of the overall system. The concept of the power electronics building block (PEBB) is an ideal solution for the power cell design. In this paper, an H-bridge inverter-based “plug and play” HPEBB is introduced into the main circuit and the controller to improve the compensation performance and reliability of the device. The section that discusses the main circuit primarily emphasizes the design of electrical parameters, physical structure, and thermal dissipation. The section that presents the controller part focuses on the principle of complex programmable logic device -based universal controller This section also analyzes typical reliability and anti-interference issues. The function and reliability of HPEBB are verified by experiments that are conducted on an HPEBB test-bed and on a 10 kV/± 10 Mvar DSTATCOM industrial prototype.