Sensorless Capacitor Voltage Detection Method of Cascaded H-Bridge STATCOM Based on Special Switching Mode Identification

Abstract

The cascaded H-bridge (CHB) static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) has been widely used in wind farm and conflux station. As the grid-connected voltage increases, the number of cascaded CHB proportionately increases. In order to achieve the capacitor voltage balance, it is necessary to independently detect the capacitor voltage of all H-bridge cells, which raises the cost of capacitor voltage detection. To solve this problem, the mapping relationship is studied between the converter output voltage and capacitor voltages by analyzing carrier phase-shifted sinusoidal pulse width modulation technique (CPS-SPWM), and special switching mode is firstly found. Based on the above finding, without changing the conventional CHB topology, an improved sensorless detection method is proposed to solve the problems of detection error, large computation burden and the application limitation in existing sensorless detection methods. Compared with conventional sensor detection, this method not only saves DC voltage sensors and data transmission channels but also suppress the third harmonics in the converter current. Finally, the effectiveness of the detection method applied on CHB STATCOM is proved by simulation and experiment.