Online API Controller for Performance Improvements in Multilevel STATCOMs

Abstract

This paper investigates improvements in the safety and operating range of transmission lines by incorporating a static synchronous compensator (STATCOM). A multilevel STATCOM-based voltage source converter (VSC) is used to ensure the safety and continuity of delivered power to a grid and is applied for emitting reactive power and reducing voltage instability resulting from abnormal operation. The key contribution of this framework is an online adaptive proportional integral (API) controller applied to a STATCOMbased VSC control circuit to obtain rapid performance and voltage stability improvements for the generation system output. The system architecture is simulated in MATLAB/Simulink, including a generation integrated with an infinite bus and STATCOM-based VSC. The simulation indicated the voltage instability at the point of common coupling (PCC) effectively declined by approximately 8% using the API controller and declined by 10% for PI controller that is tuned by the grey wolf optimization (GWO) under a sudden load variation. The results corroborate the findings obtained for the API controllers, which are technically compared with those for the GWO-based PI controllers.