A New Control Strategy for Cascaded H-bridge Multilevel Converter to Operate as a D-STATCOM

A. Marzoughi and H. Imaneini

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, College of engineering University of Tehran Tehran, Iran marzoughi.ee@gmail.com, imaneini@ut.ac.ir
AbstractIn this paper, an indirect current control method is proposed for cascaded H-bridge-based multilevel converter to operate as a STATCOM. As the indirect control approach does not need any current sensor, the system reliability increases. Using the proposed control strategy, dc link voltages are balanced, although the H-bridge cells have different amounts of losses. The reactive power is also equally distributed between the cells, independent of the active power distribution. The proposed STATCOM can be connected directly to a 3.3 kV distribution network, and work as a distribution network STATCOM (DSTATCOM), eliminating the bulky and heavy coupling transformer. Also using multicarrier phase-shifted sinusoidal PWM (MPS-SPWM), low order harmonics from the line side current are eliminated. To verify the feasibility of the control strategy, simulations are carried out on a 7-level cascaded Hbridge converter in PSCAD/EMTDC environment. Keywords-Cascaded H-bridge Converter, Indirect Control, PS-PWM Modulation D-STATCOM,

balancing, and minimum number of required components for a specific number of voltage levels. Multilevel converters have received much interest from power quality researchers because of their prominent capabilities to generate high voltages with low total harmonic distortion (THD) and lower common mode voltages. These converters have also been widely used in applications like traction systems, pumps and fans, marine propulsion, conveyors, crushers, high-voltage direct-current (HVDC) plants, wind energy conversion and etc. [6-8]. In [4,9], different high power converter topologies have been compared together in order to be used in FACTS devices implementation. In [10], a voltage source inverter-based STATCOM using unipolar SPWM switching scheme has been proposed. In the proposed control scheme, a novel method for rejecting injected current harmonics has been investigated. Also a special startup procedure has been employed to effectively start the system up. A method to control and to keep voltage balance among the H-bridge cells of a CHB-based static compensator has been proposed in [1]. In the proposed control scheme, the dc link voltages are balanced even if the cells dissipate various amounts of active power. Also the reactive power is distributed equally between the cells independent of the active power distribution. This method, however, uses high switching frequency and needs some current sensors. In [11], a fault tolerant STATCOM design based on cascaded H-bridge converter has been introduced. In the proposed system, if a switch of a cell fails (open or close fail), then the cell containing the failed switch and the corresponding cells from two other phases are removed. As a consequence, the number of the converter levels is decreased by two, and the necessary reactive power is produced by the remaining ones. It means that, the dc link voltages have to be increased to reach the earlier total voltage. So, the de link capacitors and the switches have to be over designed to tolerate the fault conditions. A cascaded multilevel converter-based D-STATCOM with unequal dc link voltages for a 6.6 kV distribution system has been introduced in [3]. The proposed system does not need any dc sources or coupling transformers, and directly connects to

I.

INTRODUCTION

In recent years, due to more intransigent regulations in the area of power quality, much more interest has been devoted to the Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACTS) as a means to improve the power quality [1,2]. Among the FACTS devices, static compensator (STATCOM) is an indispensable component to the grid voltage stability which is connected in shunt to the network for injecting or absorbing reactive power [2,3]. STATCOM can be installed whether on transmission or distribution network. The latter is called D-STATCOM and it operates in voltage and power ratings lower than the transmission system STATCOM. So, many efforts have been done to realize it without bulky and heavy coupling transformer and to reduce the size of bulky inductive filters, using multilevel converters [4]. In this case, STATCOM is composed of one multilevel converter with dc sources or energy storing capacitors on its dc side and coupling line inductances [1]. Multilevel converters are divided to three categories: neutral point clamped (NPC), flying capacitor (FC) and cascaded H-bridge (CHB) converters [5]. Among the mentioned topologies, the cascaded H-bridge converter is more interested due to its extreme modularity, easier dc voltage

978-1-4577-1829-8/12/$26.00 2012 IEEE

the distribution system. Another transformer-less multilevel converter-based STATCOM with direct control has been presented in [12]. In this paper, a multilevel cascaded H-bridge-based DSTATCOM with an indirect controller is proposed. Since the indirect controller does not need any current sensor, it leads to higher reliability and lower system cost. The proposed control strategy uses phase-shifted pulse width modulation (PS-PWM) method with 500Hz switching frequency, and also does not need any dc sources. II. CASCADED H-BRIDGE TOPOLOGY

One leg of a seven-level cascaded H-bridge converter is shown in Fig. 1. As can be seen, it consists of a series connection of identical H-bridge cells. Each H-bridge consists of four power switches (with anti-parallel diodes) and a dc bus capacitor. The power loss of each cell is modeled by a resistor parallel to the dc link capacitor. The ac side of H-bridge cells are connected in series in order to synthesize the ac terminal voltage. The ac terminal voltage of the converter, Van ,can be written as follows:

Van = Vhi
i =1

(1)

where N is the number of H-bridge cells connected in series and Vhi is the ac terminal voltage of the ith H-bridge cell. An inductor has been placed between the grid and the rectifier to shape the input current [13]. The larger the line inductance, the lower the line current THD. But there are some practical restrictions about the implementation of a high value inductance in medium voltage and high power applications. So a compromise has to be performed between the inductance value and the THD. III. CONTROL STRATEGY

Figure 1. Single phase view of the CHB converter.

where vmod(t) is the voltage that has to be produced at the converter ac side (i.e., Van in Fig. 1) to reach the control goals. It can be seen from Fig. 2 that the converter can be considered as an active rectifier working in no load condition with leading power factor [14]. So, the vector diagram of the system can be demonstrated by Fig. 3. The diagram of the proposed control system for one phase of the CHB-based D-STATCOM is shown in Fig. 4. As can be seen from this figure, the dc bus voltages are summed together and compared to the reference voltage, and the result is fed to a regulator. The output of this regulator determines the required instantaneous active power to equalize the total voltage of dc links to the reference value (3VCref).

A. Power Flow Controller The aim of the proposed control is to control the active power flow from the grid to the converter, and the reactive power flow from the converter to the grid, while the dc link voltages are regulated to a reference value. To reach this goal, a leading current has to flow to the STATCOM as shown in Fig. 2. Three line parameters shown in Fig. 2 can be written as follows:

vgrid (t ) = V sin(t )

(2) (3) (4)

vmod (t ) = Vmod sin(t + ) iLine (t ) = I sin(t + )

Figure 2. Single phase view of the STATCOM.

Knowing the value of line current, the corresponding ac terminal voltage, Vmod(t), can be calculated as follows:

vmod (t ) = vgrid (t ) Ri (t ) L

di (t ) dt

(8)

where vgrid(t) and i(t) are the instantaneous grid voltage and the line current, respectively. R and L also represent are the value of line resistance and the line inductance. It is worth noting that by synthesizing an ac voltage equal to Vmod at the ac terminal voltage, a sinusoidal current will flow in the STATCOM port which is equal to i(t) in (7). If the power loss is identical in different H-bridge cells, vmod(t) can be shared equally between the H-bridge cells and directly fed into the modulator. In this case the active and reactive powers will be distributed equally among different cells. But in practice, because of the mismatch of electric components, the cells will not have identical characteristics and will result in different losses. This fact can lead to imbalance of dc link voltages and increase of harmonic distortion at the line current. So in order to balance the dc link voltages and to prevent the performance deterioration, a voltage balancing scenario has to be developed. B. Voltage Balancing Scenario In Fig. 3, vmod can be decomposed to d and q components, to separate the active and reactive power producing components of the vmod. This decomposition is shown in Fig. 5. In Fig. 5, Vmodq is the voltage term which in action with iLine, produces the reactive power Q, and Vmodd is the voltage term which determines the active power P. It means that active and reactive powers absorbed by the STATCOM can be written as:
Figure 4. Control System overall diagram

Figure 3. Vector diagram of the STATCOM system

Having the value of required active and reactive powers and the grid voltage, the peak of line current which flows from the grid to the STATCOM can be calculated from the following equations:

1 P = Vmodd I 2 1 Q = Vmodq I 2

(9)

(10)

1 S = P2 + Q2 = V . I 2

(5)

= arctan(

Q ) P

(6)

where S is the magnitude of apparent power, P and Q are the active and reactive powers flowing to the STATCOM, and V and I represent the peak of grid voltage and the line current, respectively. As shown in Fig. 3, is the phase difference between grid voltage and line current. In order to damp oscillations due to the active power regulator output variations, a low pass filter maybe used. With I and in hand, the following expression can be written for the line current:

i (t ) = I sin(t + )

(7)

Figure 5. Decomposition of modulation voltage

To equally distribute the reactive power among the cells, Vmodq has to be equally divided between the cells:

Vmodq i =

1 Vmodq N

(11)

where Vmodqi is the reactive component of the ith cell modulation voltage and N is the number of the cells. In order to balance the dc link voltages, Vmodd, the corresponding active power producing term of Vmod, has to be shared between the cells according to the voltage of dc links. So, if a cell has a lower dc voltage, it will be modulated with a higher modulation index. Using this strategy, the voltage of dc links will be balanced. By decomposing the Vmod to the mentioned components and then developing the cells modulation voltages according to the explained strategy, some latency will be introduced to the generation of Vmod, and as a consequence, it will deteriorate the dynamic response of the STATCOM during the reactive power variations. This can even make the whole system unstable. To avoid these problems, a special voltage balancing scenario has been used. In this method, complementary voltage vectors are added to the cells common modulation voltages to acquire the individual modulation voltages, and guarantee the dc voltage balancing. To reach this goal, Vmod is divided by N, where N is the number of the cells. In our case study N=3, so:

these methods, the multicarrier phase-shifted sinusoidal pulse width modulation (MPS-SPWM) is selected due to its lower THD, lower propagated EMI, almost equal power loss of different switches and an effective output switching frequency of N times the carrier frequency (N is the number of series Hbridge cells) while the individual switches have frequencies equal to the carrier frequency. Beside these benefits, MPS-SPWM eliminates low order harmonics from the input current. In this modulation method, the harmonics are positioned as sidebands around (m-1)fc where m is the number of the converter levels and fc is the carrier signals frequency. So, as the number of voltage levels or the frequency of carrier signals increases, the gap between the fundamental and the first significant harmonic gets wider [15]. As a result, the input filter size can be reduced considerably. IV. SIMULATION RESULTS

Simulations have been carried out in PSCAD/EMTDC on a 7-level CHB rectifier to verify the control scheme performance. The rectifier is designed for connection to a 3.3 kV ac system without any bulky low frequency transformer. The system parameters are given in Table I. In this design, the switching devices will be 1700-V IGBTs and their switching frequency will be limited to 500Hz.

1 Vmode = Vmod 3

(12)

where Vmode is the common component of the cell modulation voltages. Also, an average is taken from the dc link voltages:

VDCavg =

VDC1 + VDC 2 + VDC 3 3

(13)

Then, the difference of each dc link voltage with the average voltage is calculated:

Vdif i = VDC avg VDC i

(14)
Figure 6. Cells individual modulation voltages production

The voltage difference Vdifi is fed to a PI regulator to produce the complementary vector magnitude. The output of PI regulator is multiplied by sin() and is added to Vmode in (12) in order to generate the appropriate modulation term for the ith cell, i.e., Vmodi. This action is depicted in Fig. 6. Moreover, Vmci in Fig. 6 is in phase with the injecting current to the STATCOM (iLine) to affect only the cells active power. Furthermore, the sum of the produced vector magnitudes, Vmcis has to be zero to avoid the change of the total active power injected to the STATCOM. In (14), Vdifi is calculated from average dc voltage while it can be calculated from the cell voltage reference, Vcref. This has been done to eliminate the effect of dc bus voltage 100Hz ripple on Vdifi and make the system dynamic response faster. After obtaining the appropriate modulation reference voltages for all cells, one can use different modulation methods to generate them across the ac terminals of the cells. Among

TABLE I.

CIRCUIT PARAMETERS USED FOR SIMULATION. Symbol N VLLrms Qref P Vdc L R C fs f Value 3 3.3kV 120 kVar 4.5kW 1000 V 5 mH 1 2.2 mF 500 Hz 50 Hz

Parameter Number of H-bridges Grid Voltage Reference reactive power Cells total loss DC bus voltage Input inductance Line resistance DC bus capacitor Switching frequency Line frequency

Active & Reactive Powers

The first simulation investigates the general behavior of the STATCOM when the cells are completely identical and have equal losses. The grid voltage and current are shown in Fig. 7. Also the voltage of an arbitrary dc link is shown in Fig. 8, and the corresponding active and reactive powers of the STATCOM are shown in Fig. 9. As it can be seen from these figures, the input current of the STATCOM is sinusoidal. Moreover, dc link voltages are balanced to the reference value. The second simulation investigates the behavior of the STATCOM when the H-bridge cells have different losses. In this simulation, a 20% loss difference is assumed for H-bridge cells. It means that the first, second and third cells in a phase have losses equal to 1800, 1500 and 1200 watts, respectively. In this case, the corresponding grid voltage and the line current are shown in Fig. 10. Also dc link voltages of cells and the dc link currents (which model the losses) are given in Fig. 11 and Fig. 12, respectively. It is obvious from these figures that the proposed method is able to balance the dc link voltages, independent of the cells power loss. Moreover, in the proposed method, the reactive power is distributed between the cells equally, independent of the active power distribution. In the second simulations, as well as the first one, the input current is sinusoidal.
5000 4000 3000 Vph (V) & Iph (20 A) 2000 1000 0 -1000 -2000 -3000 -4000 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 Time (s) 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5 Iph Vph

x 10

Q P

-1

-2

0.05

0.1

0.15

0.2

0.25 Time (s)

0.3

0.35

0.4

0.45

0.5

Figure 9. Active and reactive powers in case of equal losses in cells

5000 4000 3000 Vph (V) & Iph (20 A) 2000 1000 0 -1000 -2000 -3000 -4000 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 Time (s) 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5 Iph Vph

Figure 10. Grid voltage and current in case of unequal losses in dc cells

1800 (w) loss 1000 Bus 1 (V)

500

0.05

0.1

0.15

0.2

0.25

0.3

0.35

0.4

0.45

0.5

Figure 7. Voltage and current waveform in case of equal losses in cells

1000
1200 1000 800 Bus 1 (V) 600

1500 (w) loss

Bus 2 (V)

500

0.05

0.1

0.15

0.2

0.25

0.3

0.35

0.4

0.45

0.5

1200 (w) loss 1000

400 200 0

Bus 3 (V)

500

0
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 Time (s) 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5

0.05

0.1

0.15

0.2

0.25 time(s)

0.3

0.35

0.4

0.45

0.5

Figure 8. Dc bus voltage of cell # 1 in case of equal losses in cells

Figure 11. Dc link voltages of a phase using the proposed voltage balancing method

In the last simulation, a reactive power step is given to the control strategy to investigate the system dynamic performance. In this case, the reactive power reference is increased from 120kVar to 200kVar at t=0.3s in a stepwise manner.

1.5 Dc bus currents (A)

system has fast dynamic at startup and transients to produce the required reactive power and improve the distribution system power quality. Moreover, the switching frequency maintained at a low constant value. REFERENCES

0.5

I1 I2 I3 0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 Time (s) 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5

[1]

Figure 12. Dc links current, modeling the power losses

3 2 1 0 -1 -2 x 10
5

[2]
Q P

[3]

[4]

[5]
-3 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 Time (s) 0.4 0.5 0.6

Figure 13. System response to reactive power step

1200 1000

[6]

[7]

[8]
800 Bus 1 (V) 600 400 200 0

[9]

0.1

0.2

0.3 Time (s)

0.4

0.5

0.6

[10]

Figure 14. Dc link voltage of cell # 1. [11]

The control system response to this step is demonstrated in Fig. 13. The corresponding dc link voltage of an arbitrary cell is also shown in Fig. 14. From Fig. 13, one can see that the proposed control system has a fast dynamic response to the reactive power changes. It also can be seen the active power term, i.e., P, has been increased in this study. The active power increase is due to the increase in the line current and consequently more electric losses in the line series resistance. I. CONCLSIONS

[12]

[13]

[14]

In this paper, an indirect control strategy was introduced for cascaded H-bridge converter to work as STATCOM. Although the controller does not use any current sensor, it is able to program the input current to be sinusoidal and dc link voltages to be equal. Also the STATCOM does not need any dc power sources. The presented control strategy can be applied to CHB converter with any number of cells. The proposed control

[15]

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Active and Reactive Powers