Thesis Kosei SHINODA

“Control and Energy Management of MMC-based Multi-Terminal HVDC Grids”

The scope of this thesis includes control and management of the Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC)-based Multi-Terminal Direct Current (MTDC).

At first, our focus is paid on the internally stored energy, which is the important additional degree of freedom brought by the complex topology of MMC. In order to draw out the utmost of this additional degree of freedom, an in-depth analysis of the limits of this internally stored energy is carried out, and they are mathematically formulated. Then, this degree of freedom of the MMC is used to provide a completely new solution to improve the DC voltage dynamics. A novel control strategy, named Virtual Capacitor Control, is proposed. Under this control, the MMC behaves as if there were a physical capacitor whose size is adjustable. Thus, it is possible to virtually increase the equivalent capacitance of the DC grid to mitigate the DC voltage fluctuations in MTDC systems. Finally, the scope is extended to MMC-based MTDC grid.

One of the crucial challenges for such system is to cope with a sudden loss of a converter station which may lead to a great variation of the system voltage. The voltage droop method is commonly used for this purpose. The analysis shows that the desired control action may not be exerted when the available headroom of the converter stations are insufficient. We thus propose a novel voltage droop control structure which permits to provide different actions depending on the sign of DC voltage deviation caused by the disturbance of system voltage as well as an algorithm that determines the droop parameters taking into account the operating point and the available headroom of each station.

Keywords: Modular Multilevel Converters (MMCs), High-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission, Multi-Terminal DC (MTDC) grid, Converter control, Energy management, Primary voltage control, Voltage droop control, Modeling.