A Data-Driven Condition Monitoring Method for Capacitor in Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC)

The modular multilevel converter (MMC) is a topology that consists of a high number of capacitors, and degradation of capacitors can lead to converter malfunction, limiting the overall system lifetime. Condition monitoring methods can be applied to assess the health status of capacitors and realize predictive maintenance to improve reliability. Current research works for condition monitoring of capacitors in an MMC mainly monitor either capacitance or equivalent series resistance (ESR), while these two health indicators can shift at different speeds and lead to different end-of-life times. Hence, monitoring only one of these parameters may lead to unreliable health status evaluation. This paper proposes a data-driven method to estimate capacitance and ESR at the same time, in which particle swarm optimization (PSO) is leveraged to update the obtained estimations. Then, the results of the estimations are used to predict the sub-module voltage, which is based on a capacitor voltage equation. Furthermore, minimizing the mean square error between the predicted and actual measured voltage makes the estimations closer to the actual values. The effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method are validated through simulations and experiments.

Semiconductor Devices Condition Monitoring Using Harmonics in Inverter Control Variables

The health status of power semiconductor devices in power converters is important but difficult to monitor. This paper analyzes the relationship between harmonics in inverter control variables and a health precursor (the on-state voltage Von of power semiconductor devices). Based on the analysis, harmonics can estimate Von without adding extra sensing circuits. The method is validated through simulations.

A Gray-Box Stability Analysis Mechanism for Power Electronic Converters

This paper proposes a gray-box stability analysis mechanism based on data-driven dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) for commercial grid-tied power electronics converters with limited information on its control parameters and topology. By fusing the underlying physical constraints of the state equations into data snapshots, the system dynamic state matrix and input matrix are simultaneously approximated to identify the dominant system dynamic modes and eigenvalues using the DMD with control (DMDc) algorithm. While retaining the advantages of eliminating the need for intrinsic controller information, the proposed gray-box method establishes higher accuracy and interpretable outcomes over the conventional DMD method. Finally, under experimental conditions of a low-frequency oscillation scenario in electrified railways featuring a single-phase converter, the proposed gray-box DMDc is verified to identify the dominant eigenvalues more accurately.

Data-Driven Stability Assessment of Power Electronic Converters with Multi-Resolution Dynamic Mode Decomposition

Harmonic instability occurs frequently in the power electronic converter system. This paper leverages multi-resolution dynamic mode decomposition (MR-DMD) as a data-driven diagnostic tool for the system stability of power electronic converters, not requiring complex modeling and detailed control information. By combining dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) with the multi-resolution analysis used in wavelet theory, dynamic modes and eigenvalues can be identified at different decomposition levels and time scales with the MR-DMD algorithm, thereby allowing for handling datasets with transient time behaviors, which is not achievable using conventional DMD. Further, the selection criteria for important parameters in MR-DMD are clearly defined through derivation, elucidating the reason for enabling it to extract eigenvalues within different frequency ranges. Finally, the analysis results are verified using the dataset collected from the experimental platform of a low-frequency oscillation scenario in electrified railways featuring a single-phase converter.

Model-Free Voltage Regulation of Unbalanced Distribution Network Based on Surrogate Model and Deep Reinforcement Learning

Accurate knowledge of the distribution system topology and parameters is required to achieve good voltage controls, but this is difficult to obtain in practice. This paper develops a model-free approach based on the surrogate model and deep reinforcement learning (DRL). We have also extended it to deal with unbalanced three-phase scenarios. The key idea is to learn a surrogate model to capture the relationship between the power injections and voltage fluctuation of each node from historical data instead of using the original inaccurate model affected by errors and uncertainties. This allows us to integrate the DRL with the learned surrogate model. In particular, DRL is applied to learn the optimal control strategy from the experiences obtained by continuous interactions with the surrogate model. The integrated framework contains training three networks, i.e., surrogate model, actor, and critic networks, which fully leverage the strong nonlinear fitting ability of deep learning and DRL for online decision making. Several single-phase approaches have also been extended to deal with three-phase unbalance scenarios and the simulation results on the IEEE 123-bus system show that our proposed method can achieve similar performance as those that use accurate physical models.