Limiting Characteristics of Capacitor Discharge Current of MMC-Based System Using the SFCL on Short Circuit

Currently, HVDC is in the spotlight for long-distance transmission and power connection between countries. Among them, MMC-HVDC is a new conversion technology that can solve the problems of switching loss and harmonics. MMC consists of many submodules connected in series. And the one submodule is co...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on applied superconductivity 2022-06, Vol.32 (4), p.1-5
Main Authors: Kim, Geon-Woong, Choi, Hyo-Sang
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Capacitors
Circuit faults
Circuits
Constraining
Discharge
Discharges (electric)
Electrical surges
fault current limiters
Fault currents
HVDC transmission
Insulated gate bipolar transistors
modular multilevel converters
Resistance
Semiconductor devices
Short circuits
Voltage
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Summary:Currently, HVDC is in the spotlight for long-distance transmission and power connection between countries. Among them, MMC-HVDC is a new conversion technology that can solve the problems of switching loss and harmonics. MMC consists of many submodules connected in series. And the one submodule is composed of IGBTs, Diode, and Capacitor. At the transient state, the charged capacitor is discharged and added to the fault current. It will generate tens of times the surge current during the delays all IGBTs turn-off. This causes semiconductor device destruction. To solve this problem, we applied SFCL with fast response characteristics to the MMC. The response speed of the resistive SFCL is faster than that of the MMC system protection device, which can effectively limit the capacitor discharge current before the protection device operates. In this paper, AC grid, MMC-HVDC, DC cable and SFCL were modeled using PSCAD/EMTDC. After that, we confirmed the capacitor discharge current, current limiting rate, and interruption characteristics through DC line short circuit failure simulation. As a result, SFCL effectively limits the capacitor discharge current and continuously lowers the level of the fault current.
ISSN:1051-8223
1558-2515
DOI:10.1109/TASC.2022.3140697