A Capacitance Monitoring Strategy Based on Offset Error Compensation for Modular Multilevel Converters

Abstract

The modular multilevel converter (MMC) is a research hotspot in medium-voltage and high-voltage applications. The measurement offset error would cause an increase in the monitoring error of the submodule (SM) capacitance of the MMC, affecting the estimation accuracy of the SM capacitance monitoring. This paper proposes a capacitor monitoring strategy based on the offset error compensation, where two reasonable capacitor monitoring periods are selected in one fundamental period under the proposed voltage-balancing control (VBC) based on the virtual capacitor voltage (VCV) to compensate for the offset error impact on the capacitance monitoring. The proposed strategy can effectively eliminate the offset error impact on the capacitance monitoring, which ensures the accuracy of the SM capacitance monitoring in the MMCs. The effectiveness of the proposed monitoring strategy is confirmed by the simulations and experiments.

Keywords

• converter
• reliability
• modular multilevel converters (MMCs)
• submodule