Non-Blocking Fault Current Limiting Control of Half-Bridge MMCs for MTDC Transmission

Abstract

A key protection requirement in multiterminal HVDC (MTDC) transmission systems is to selectively isolate faulted areas using DC circuit breakers (DCCBs) during DC faults while keeping the rest of the systems in operation. However, in MTDC systems using half-bridge modular multilevel converters (HB-MMCs), the lack of inherent fault current suppression capability in HB-MMCs can cause converter blocking before fault clearance by DCCBs. This work presents an active fault current limiting (AFCL) control strategy for HB-MMCs to mitigate DC fault currents, thus avoiding converter blocking and reducing the breaking capability required of DCCBs. In addition, a systematic approach is proposed to design the AFCL control strategy under converter and network stability constraints. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is demonstrated through PSCAD on two typical MTDC systems during DC faults.