Impact of DC fault blocking capability on the sizing of the DC-DC Modular Multilevel Converter
- Resource Type
- Conference
- Authors
- Paez, J. D.; Morel, F.; Bacha, S.; Dworakowski, Piotr; Frey, D.
- Source
- 2020 22nd European Conference on Power Electronics and Applications (EPE'20 ECCE Europe) Power Electronics and Applications (EPE'20 ECCE Europe), 2020 22nd European Conference on. :1-10 Sep, 2020
- Subject
- Aerospace
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Robotics and Control Systems
Transportation
Circuit faults
Topology
DC-DC power converters
Capacitors
Fault currents
Europe
HVDC transmission
HVDC
Modular Multilevel Converter
DC-DC converter
Fault blocking
- Language
The capability of DC-DC converters of blocking DC faults is an important issue for the development of HVDC meshed grids. This paper analyzes the impact on the converter design of including such characteristic for the DC-DC Modular Multilevel Converter. Steady state and transient analysis are proposed and tested, showing how the converter should be oversized to include this feature. From this analysis it is concluded that including the fault blocking capability has an impact on the power losses and the investment in semiconductors but not in the investment on capacitors. The converter presents better indicators for low DC transformation ratios demonstrating the interest of the topology for these applications. However for those ratios, the impact of including fault blocking capability is the highest.