An Improved Alternate Arm Converter for HVDC applications

Vozikis, Dimitrios and Adam, Grain and Holliday, Derrick and Finney, Stephen; (2018) An Improved Alternate Arm Converter for HVDC applications. In: IECON 2018 - 44th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society. IEEE, USA. ISBN 9781509066858

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Abstract

This paper presents an Improved Alternate Arm Converter where the director switches of the upper and lower arms of the conventional alternate arm converter are rearranged as a conventional two-level converter. The flying capacitor (i.e. the capacitor across the director switches) in each phase leg facilitates seamless current commutation between the upper and lower arms, and eliminates the need for the main dc-link capacitor across the positive and negative dc rails. The modifications introduced to the power circuit necessitate the proposed converter to adopt a new operating regime that ensures simultaneous conduction of the upper and lower arms of each phase leg as in the modular multilevel converter. The operating principle, modulation methods of the proposed converter, and sizing of its main components are described in detail, and substantiated by simulations.