DC-Link Control Schemes in Multilevel Converters for WECS

Abstract

The introduction of renewable energy resources since the late 1990s as an alternative to fossil energies has impact the development of wind energy and its integration to the grid. From the early 2000s, the wind energy has positioned itself as the most grown-up energy market in the world. This fact has introduced the need to deal with increasing power demands with limited generation capabilities, in terms of generator power density, for low rotation speeds and medium voltage generation within a grid interconnection in high voltage, and other grid code demands, like THD, power factor regulation, and the requirement of continuous operation under faulty condition. Until today, this issue has been solved using classical power converter topologies, using three-level voltage source converters (3LVSC) or multilevel configurations, such as neutral point clamped and cascaded H-Bridge topologies. In this chapter, the main advantages and drawbacks of classical multilevel converter topologies are analyzed, in terms of their DC-link voltage stability capability and different approaches to DC-link control and to new converter topologies, derived from classical topologies, are presented and compared with simulation results.