A Tri-Port Current-Source Soft-Switching Medium-Voltage String Inverter for Large-Scale Solar-Plus-Storage Farms

Abstract

This article presents a tri-port current-source soft-switching medium-voltage string inverter (TMVSI) to reduce the Levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of large-scale solar-plus-storage (SPS) farms. Throughout this work, the topology, operating principle, circuit simulation, control, and hardware design of the TMVSI are introduced. In addition, three key challenges compromising the performance of the TMVSI are addressed in this article. First, a new feed-forward compensation for model predictive control of the TMVSI is proposed to compensate for sampling and computational delay and high dc-link ripple with low computational cost and high scalability. Second, the use of laminated permanent magnets is proposed to reduce the losses of the MV medium-frequency transformer (MFT) in the TMVSI while increasing its saturation current. Finally, an improved U-shape winding pattern is proposed to decrease the leakage inductance of the MV MFT and reduce the voltage stress across semiconductor switches without adding cost or complexity. The effectiveness of the TMVSI is validated by experiments at up to <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$20\,\mathrm{kW/500\,V}$</tex-math></inline-formula> in different test cases with custom-built prototypes. The contributions of this work make the TMVSI a viable solution to SPS farms and unleash its potential for LCOE reduction.