Capacitor Voltage Ripple Minimization of a Modular Three-Phase AC/DC Power Electronics Transformer With Four-Winding Power Channel

Abstract

Power electronic transformer (PET) with modular cascaded structure has become a flexible interface between AC and DC grids. Nonetheless, the notable 2nd-order ripple power introduced from the AC source requires considerable energy storage in the module capacitors, which is likely to degrade the overall power density and increase system cost. In this paper, a power channel based four-winding PET (PC-PET) is proposed to address such an issue. Owing to the phase-crossing power channels, the low-frequency ripples can cancel each other through magnetic flux counteracting. To improve the accuracy of power decoupling, the effect compromised by inconsistent windings is considered. Accordingly, a proportional-resonant (PR) control based power decoupling strategy for PC-PET incorporated with power balance is proposed to decouple the three-phase low-frequency ripple powers, and minimize the voltage ripple in module capacitors. Additionally, the improvement of power density is discussed based on analyses on power losses, capacitor volume and transformer volume. Simulation and experimental results verified the validity of proposed control strategies.

Keywords

• PET
• power channel
• power decoupling
• QAB