Voltage-Sourced Converters in Power Systems

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Electronic Power Conversion

1.1 INTRODUCTION

Historically, power-electronic converters have been predominantly employed in domestic, industrial, and information technology applications. However, due to advancements in power semiconductor and microelectronics technologies, their application in power systems has gained considerably more attention in the past two decades. Thus, power-electronic converters are increasingly utilized in power conditioning, compensation, and power filtering applications.

A power-electronic converter consists of a power circuit—which can b realized through a variety of configurations of power switches and passive components—and a control/protection system. The link between the two is through gating/switching signals and feedback control signals. This chapter briefly introduces power circuits of the most commonly used power-electronic converters for high-power applications. In the subsequent chapters, two specific configurations, that is, the two-level voltage-sourced converter (VSC) and the three-level neutral-point clamped (NPC) converter, are analyzed in more detail. This book focuses on the modeling and control aspects of the two-level VSC and the three-level NPC converter. However, the presented analysis techniques and the control design methodologies are conceptually also applicable to the other families of power-electronic converters introduced in this chapter.

1.2 POWER-ELECTRONIC CONVERTERS AND CONVERTER SYSTEMS

In this book we define a power-electronic ...