• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.17 no.4
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• pp.942-952
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• 2017

Modular multilevel converters (MMCs) have been receiving extensive research interest in high/medium-voltage applications due to its modularity, scalability, reliability, high-voltage capability, and excellent harmonic performance. Submodule capacitors are usually rather bulky because they have to withstand fundamental frequency voltage fluctuations. To reduce the capacitance of these capacitors, this study proposes a modified MMC with an active power decoupling circuit within each submodule. The modified submodule contains an auxiliary half bridge, with its capacitor split in two. Also, the midpoints of the half bridge and the split capacitors are connected by an inductor. With this modified submodule, the fundamental frequency voltage fluctuation can be suppressed to a great extent. The second-order voltage fluctuation, which is the second most significant component in submodule voltage fluctuations, is removed by the proper control of the second-order circulating current. Consequently, the submodule capacitance is significantly reduced. The viability and effectiveness of the proposed new MMC are confirmed by the simulation and experimental results. The proposed MMC is best suited for medium-voltage applications where power density is given a high priority.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.11 no.7
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• pp.299-306
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• 2022

In recent, sensors embedded in robots, equipment, and circuits have become common, and research for diagnosing device failures by learning measured sensor data is being actively conducted. This failure diagnosis study is divided into a classification model for predicting failure situations or types and a regression model for numerically predicting failure conditions. In the case of a classification model, it simply checks the presence or absence of a failure or defect (Class), whereas a regression model has a higher learning difficulty because it has to predict one value among countless numbers. So, the reason that regression modeling is more difficult is that there are many irregular situations in which it is difficult to determine one output from a similar input when predicting by matching input and output. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on input and output data with periodicity, analyze the input/output relationship, and secure regularity between input and output data by performing sliding window-based input data patterning. In order to apply the proposed method, in this study, current and temperature data with periodicity were collected from MMC(Modular Multilevel Converter) circuit system and learning was carried out using ANN. As a result of the experiment, it was confirmed that when a window of 2% or more of one cycle was applied, performance of 97% or more of fit could be secured.

• Journal of Energy Engineering
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.37-45
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• 2005

The fuel cell system is one of very useful energy sources. The system has advantages as renew-able and environmental sources. To obtain AC electricity from fuel cells, inverters are necessary. A multilevel converter is used as an inverter for a high power fuel cell system. Through harmonic analysis, it is shown that the harmonic components and THD increase while fundamental component decreases as voltage sag increases. To solve the voltage sag problems, three different approaches are investigated in this paper; installation of a boost converter at the fuel cell output, control of pulse widths, and use of ultracapacitors. The proposed three approaches are analyzed and compared using simulation and experimental results.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.1471-1481
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• 2014

This paper presents the new power dissipation model of individual switching device in a high-level modular multilevel converter (MMC), which can be mostly used in voltage sourced converter (VSC) based high-voltage direct current (HVDC) system and flexible AC transmission system (FACTS). Also, the voltage balancing method based on sorting algorithm is newly proposed to advance the MMC functionalities by effectively adjusting switching variations of the sub-module (SM). The proposed power dissipation model does not fully calculate the average power dissipation for numerous switching devices in an arm module. Instead, it estimates the power dissipation of every switching element based on the inherent operational principle of SM in MMC. In other words, the power dissipation is computed in every single switching event by using the polynomial curve fitting model with minimum computational efforts and high accuracy, which are required to manage the large number of SMs. After estimating the value of power dissipation, the thermal condition of every switching element is considered in the case of external disturbance. Then, the arm modeling for high-level MMC and its control scheme is implemented with the electromagnetic transient simulation program. Finally, the case study for applying to the MMC based HVDC system is carried out to select the appropriate insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) module in a steady-state, as well as to estimate the proper thermal condition of every switching element in a transient state.

• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Power Electronics
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• v.22 no.1
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• pp.82-88
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• 2017

This study proposes a new topology for the performance test of a valve consisting of a modular multilevel converter (MMC)-based static synchronous compensator (STATCOM). The conventional valve performance test equipment requires high-voltage AC source of several kV rating because the number of submodules to be tested in a valve should be at least six or eight. However, the power source of the proposed scheme is DC and not AC source. The DC power source voltage range of the proposed test circuit is from several volts to several tens of volts. Therefore, the size and cost for the performance test equipment can be reduced considerably compared with the conventional method. The proposed scheme satisfies the requirements of the IEC 62927 standard. Simulations are conducted for a valve of 50[MVA] MMC-based STATCOM. Experimental results with a scale-downed setup show the validity of the proposed performance test topology.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.9 no.2
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• pp.133-145
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• 2009

In this paper a modular high performance MV-to-LV rectifier based on a cascaded H-bridge rectifier is presented. The proposed rectifier can directly connect to the medium voltage levels and provide a low-voltage and highly-stable DC interface with the consumer applications. The input stage eliminates the necessity for heavy and bulky step-down transformers. It corrects the input power factor and maintains the voltage balance among the individual DC buses. The second stage includes the high frequency parallel-output DC/DC converters which prepares the galvanic isolation, regulates the output voltage, and attenuates the low frequency voltage ripple ($2f_{line}$) generated by the first stage. The parallel-output converters can work in interleaving mode and the active load-current sharing technique is utilized to balance the load power among them. The detailed analysis for modeling and control of the proposed structure is presented. The validity and performance of the proposed topology is verified by simulation and experimental results.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.12 no.2
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• pp.344-356
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• 2012

In recent years, multilevel technology has become an effective and practical solution in the field of moderate and high voltage applications. This paper discusses an APF with a three-level NPC inverter. Obviously, the application of such converter to APFs is hindered by the problem of the voltage unbalance of DC capacitors, which leads to system instability. This paper comprehensively analyzes the theoretical limitations of the neutral-point voltage balancing problem for tracking different harmonic currents utilizing current switching functions from the space vector PWM (SVPWM) point of view. The fluctuation of the neutral point caused by the load currents of certain order harmonic frequency is reported and quantified. Furthermore, this paper presents a close-loop digital control algorithm of the DC voltage for this APF. A PI controller regulates the DC voltage in the outer-loop controller. In the current-loop controller, this paper proposes a simple neutral-point voltage control method. The neutral-point voltage imbalance is restrained by selecting small vectors that will move the neutral-point voltage in the direction opposite the direction of the unbalance. The experiment results illustrate that the performance of the proposed approach is satisfactory.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Industry Convergence
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• v.23 no.1
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• pp.65-71
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• 2020

Recently, interest in the DC transmission is rapidly increasing worldwide. In many countries and leading companies are prior to the aggressive development of HVDC technology and application. Especially, VSC-HVDC system has been widely applied to transfer power at long distance between power plant and power consumption area. Therefore in this paper, we analyzed the benefit-cost of VSC-HVDC system which has more advantages than existing transmission system. The proposed system is MMC(Modular Multilevel Converter) VSC-HVDC system that have stability of Power Grid, interconnect Large-scale New Power Generation Plants by prevents Blackout. And MMC VSC-HVDC system Reduced the loss importing foreign systems. And the benefits were calculated in four stages, and the costs were applied to the actual project. By evaluating the various avoidance costs compared to the benefit-cost, it was confirmed that MMC VSC-HVDC system was advantageous in system stability and economic and social benefits.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.56-69
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• 2018

In this paper, an improved Space Vector Modulation (SVM) based fault tolerant operation on a nine-level Cascaded H-Bridge (CHB) inverter with an additional backup circuit is proposed. Any type of fault in a power converter may result in a power interruption and productivity loss. Three different faults on H-bridge modules in all three phases based on the SVM approach are investigated with diagrams. Any fault in an inverter phase creates an unbalanced output voltage, which can lead to instability in the system. An additional auxiliary unit is connected in series to the three phase cascaded H-bridge circuit. With the help of this and the redundant switching states in SVM, the CHB inverter produces a balanced output with low harmonic distortion. This ensures high DC bus utilization under numerous fault conditions in three phases, which improves the system reliability. Simulation results are presented on three phase nine-level inverter with the automatic fault detection algorithm in the MATLAB/SIMULINK software tool, and experimental results are presented with DSP on five-level inverter to validate the practicality of the proposed SVM fault tolerance strategy on a CHB inverter with an auxiliary circuit.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.18 no.1
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• pp.204-211
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• 2018

At present, one of two LCC-HVDC systems is responsible for controlling the grid frequency of the Jeju Island Power System (JIPS). The grid voltage is regulated by using STATCOMs. However, these two objectives can be achieved in one device that is called by a modular multilevel converter-high voltage direct current (MMC-HVDC) system. Therefore, this paper proposes frequency and voltage control strategies for the JIPS based on a MMC-HVDC system. In this case, the ancillary frequency and voltage controllers are implemented into the MMC-HVDC system. The modelling of the JIPS is done based on the parameters and measured data from the real JIPS. The simulation results obtained from the PSCAD/EMTDC simulation program are confirmed by comparing them to measured data from the real JIPS. Then, the effect of the MMC-HVDC system on the JIPS will be tested in many cases of operation when the JIPS operates with and without STATCOMs. The objective is to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.