Reliability-Oriented Design of Modular Multilevel Converters for Medium-Voltage STATCOM

João Victor Matos Farias*, Allan Fagner Cupertino, Victor De Nazareth Ferreira, Heverton Augusto Pereira, Seleme Isaac Seleme, Remus Teodorescu

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

40 Citations (Scopus)
283 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Modular multilevel converters (MMC) are complex systems, composed of many elements, and exposed to critical load demands in some cases. Thereby, a detailed design of its components is of preeminent importance to achieve a high system-level reliability. However, the high number of devices challenges the tradeoff between cost and reliability. This article, introduces a reliability-oriented design methodology, based on the cost to achieve a predefined unreliability level (Ux). A flowchart presents the main steps of the process, including the mission profile definition, selection of power devices, thermal modeling, reliability modeling, and the reliability-oriented selection. To evaluate the proposed methodology, a case study considering 17 MVA/13.8 kV MMC-static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) with a real mission profile data is conducted. A Ux - cost map is introduced to compare various design solutions, based on power devices of different voltage classes and current capabilities.

Original languageEnglish
Article number8818632
JournalIEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics
Volume67
Issue number8
Pages (from-to)6206-6214
Number of pages9
ISSN0278-0046
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2020

Keywords

  • Lifetime
  • modular multilevel converters (MMC)-static synchronous compensator (STATCOM)
  • power devices
  • reliability-oriented design

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