Comparative performance of modular with cascaded H-bridge three level inverters

The conventional two-level inverter becomes no longer has the ability to cope with the high-power requirement, so this paper discusses two very common topologies of multilevel inverter like modular multi-level converter (MMC) and cascaded H-bridge (CHB) multi-level inverter for induction motor drive applications. This work attempts to investigate the comparison between MMC and CHB. The comparison is done in aspects of the configuration, concept of operation, advantages and disadvantages, the comparison is also consider output voltage (line to line) waveform, total harmonic distortion (THD) of the output line voltage waveform and the current drawn by both inverters. The performance of the inverters under carrier-based pulse width modulation (PWM) technique and mainly in-phase disposition (IPD), level shifted pulse width modulation is viewed. The paper discusses the comparison between the two multilevel inverters (MLIs) with motor drive applications especially induction motor. The operation of the motor is studied under certain value of load torque. The simulation results for the induction motor with the two inverters (modular multi-level and Cascaded H-bride) for three numbers of levels using MATLAB/Simulink are provided). The obtained results are encouraging and promising especially in the improvement of the THD% results

Model Predictive Control for Mitigating Sensor Attacks on Multilevel Inverters

Nowadays, multilevel power inverters have become a hot research topic which are being widely used in smart grids. They are also driving devices for conveyors, compressors, motors, and can enable uninterruptible power supply for critical loads such as database centers or telecommunications base stations. In the future, smart grids will play an important role to achieve higher efficiency, smarter control and better performance. Such an ambitious goal can only be achieved by inverters with higher voltage and power levels. The smart grids are the typical cyber-physical systems that is composed of physical processes and computation units combined by sensors, actuators, and communication devices. The smart grids are apt to errors and vicious attacks on their physical construction leading to considerable damage, such as false data injection (FDI), denial of service (DOS). The vicious data injection can effectively bypass the detection of system and cause serious effects on the grid. In recent years, some advanced control approaches have been proposed to perform inverter current control. Among them, model predictive control (MPC) is a promising one that makes use of explicit system models to predict its future response and optimize system performance. It has unique advantages that can accurately forecast the future response of the system and have fast response. However, the effectiveness and the accuracy of the conventional MPC rely on whether the system model is accurate. Uncertainty and false data injection in the system model sometimes lead to unresponsive or even unstable control systems. Conventional MPC is hard to keep the system stable when the uncertainty and malicious attack happen. In existing studies, although various attacks have been investigated, the undetectable false data injection aiming at the inverter system was rarely studied. In the thesis, the model of the cascaded H-bridge inverter is established and conventional MPC to achieve load current control is applied. It shows great performance to achieve load current control and has fast dynamic control. Then considering various attack signals such as step attack signals, pulse attack signals to the sensors in the system, the conventional MPC loses the ability to achieve a stable and effective current control. According to simulation results, Kalman Filter model is built which can filter some Gaussian noises from the sensors in the system. Then from the perspective of attacker, a special FDI attack is designed that can effectively bypass the Kalman Filter. For the system that targeted by the FDI and DOS attack, a new controller is designed based on the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) algorithm and MPC strategy which can achieve the load current control with high output quality. Finally, the new control method based on KNN and MPC is compared with conventional MPC. The simulation results are analyzed and conclusion have been made. A modified MPC combined with KNN algorithm proposed in this thesis can detect bad data that can enter the system without triggering alarms. The case studies show the modified MPC based on KNN algorithm can achieve current control accurately when the system is injected by various attack signals showing better performance of current control with low total harmonic distortion (THD)

Model Predictive Control for Mitigating Sensor Attacks on Multilevel Inverters

Nowadays, multilevel power inverters have become a hot research topic which are being widely used in smart grids. They are also driving devices for conveyors, compressors, motors, and can enable uninterruptible power supply for critical loads such as database centers or telecommunications base stations. In the future, smart grids will play an important role to achieve higher efficiency, smarter control and better performance. Such an ambitious goal can only be achieved by inverters with higher voltage and power levels. The smart grids are the typical cyber-physical systems that is composed of physical processes and computation units combined by sensors, actuators, and communication devices. The smart grids are apt to errors and vicious attacks on their physical construction leading to considerable damage, such as false data injection (FDI), denial of service (DOS). The vicious data injection can effectively bypass the detection of system and cause serious effects on the grid. In recent years, some advanced control approaches have been proposed to perform inverter current control. Among them, model predictive control (MPC) is a promising one that makes use of explicit system models to predict its future response and optimize system performance. It has unique advantages that can accurately forecast the future response of the system and have fast response. However, the effectiveness and the accuracy of the conventional MPC rely on whether the system model is accurate. Uncertainty and false data injection in the system model sometimes lead to unresponsive or even unstable control systems. Conventional MPC is hard to keep the system stable when the uncertainty and malicious attack happen. In existing studies, although various attacks have been investigated, the undetectable false data injection aiming at the inverter system was rarely studied. In the thesis, the model of the cascaded H-bridge inverter is established and conventional MPC to achieve load current control is applied. It shows great performance to achieve load current control and has fast dynamic control. Then considering various attack signals such as step attack signals, pulse attack signals to the sensors in the system, the conventional MPC loses the ability to achieve a stable and effective current control. According to simulation results, Kalman Filter model is built which can filter some Gaussian noises from the sensors in the system. Then from the perspective of attacker, a special FDI attack is designed that can effectively bypass the Kalman Filter. For the system that targeted by the FDI and DOS attack, a new controller is designed based on the K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) algorithm and MPC strategy which can achieve the load current control with high output quality. Finally, the new control method based on KNN and MPC is compared with conventional MPC. The simulation results are analyzed and conclusion have been made. A modified MPC combined with KNN algorithm proposed in this thesis can detect bad data that can enter the system without triggering alarms. The case studies show the modified MPC based on KNN algorithm can achieve current control accurately when the system is injected by various attack signals showing better performance of current control with low total harmonic distortion (THD)

Cascaded Converters For Integration And Management Of Grid Level Energy Storage Systems

ABSTRACT CASCADED CONVERTERS FOR INTEGRATION AND MANAGEMENT OF GRID-LEVEL ENERGY STORAGE SYSTEMS by ZUHAIR ALAAS December 2017 Advisor: Dr. Caisheng Wang Major: ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING Degree: Doctor of Philosophy This research work proposes two cascaded multilevel inverter structures for BESS. The gating and switching control of switching devices in both inverter typologies are done by using a phase-shifted PWM scheme. The first proposed isolated multilevel inverter is made up of three-phase six-switch inverter blocks with a reduced number of power components compared with traditional isolated CHB. The suggested isolated converter has only one battery string for three-phase system that can be used for high voltage and high power applications such as grid connected BESS and alternative energy systems. The isolated inverter enables dq frame based simple control and eliminates the issues of single-phase pulsating power, which can cause detrimental impacts on certain dc sources. Simulation studies have been carried out to compare the proposed isolated multi-level inverter with an H-bridge cascaded transformer inverter. The simulation results verified the performance of the isolated inverter. The second proposed topology is a Hierarchal Cascaded Multilevel Converter (HCMC) with phase to phase SOC balancing capability which also for high voltage and high power battery energy storage systems. The HCMC has a hybrid structure of half-bridge converters and H-bridge inverters and the voltage can be hierarchically cascaded to reach the desired value at the half-bridge and the H-bridge levels. The uniform SOC battery management is achieved by controlling the half-bridge converters that are connected to individual battery modules/cells. Simulation studies and experimental results have been carried on a large scale battery system under different operating conditions to verify the effectiveness of the proposed inverters. Moreover, this dissertation presents a new three-phase SOC equalizing circuit, called six-switch energy-level balancing circuit (SSBC), which can be used to realize uniform SOC operation for full utilization of the battery capacity in proposed HCMC or any CMI inverter while keeping balanced three-phase operation. A sinusoidal PWM modulation technique is used to control power transferring between phases. Simulation results have been carried out to verify the performance of the proposed SSBC circuit of uniform three-phase SOC balancing