The Series Bridge Converter (SBC): design of a compact modular multilevel converter for grid applications

Amankwah, Emmanuel K.; Costabeber, Alessando; Watson, Alan James; Trainer, David; Jasim, Omar; Chivite-Zabalza, Javier; Clare, Jon C.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel hybrid modular multilevel voltage source converter suitable for grid applications. The proposed converter retains the advantages of other modular multilevel topologies and can be made more compact making it attractive for offshore stations and other footprint critical applications like city infeeds. In this paper, the basic operating principle and design criteria for the converter implementation are presented. The submodule capacitor requirements which have significant influence on the size of a converter station are also evaluated and compared to the MMC.
The performance of the converter is supported by simulation results from a representative medium voltage scaled demonstrator.

Citation

Amankwah, E. K., Costabeber, A., Watson, A. J., Trainer, D., Jasim, O., Chivite-Zabalza, J., & Clare, J. C. (2016). The Series Bridge Converter (SBC): design of a compact modular multilevel converter for grid applications

• Conference Name: 42nd Annual Conference of IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IECON 2016)
• End Date: Oct 27, 2016
• Acceptance Date: Jun 28, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Dec 22, 2016
• Publication Date: Oct 24, 2016
• Deposit Date: Oct 14, 2016
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 24, 2016
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: MMC, Converter design, capacitor sizing, Offshore, Compact HVDC VSC systems
• Public URL: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/37544
• Publisher URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7793197/
• Related Public URLs: http://www.iecon2016.org/
• Additional Information: © 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.; doi: 10.1109/IECON.2016.7793197