Real-Time Device-Level Transient Electrothermal Model for Modular Multilevel Converter on FPGA

• Published in: IEEE transactions on power electronics Vol. 31; no. 9; pp. 6155 - 6168
• Main Authors: Shen, Zhuoxuan, Dinavahi, Venkata
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.09.2016; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: bipolar transistor (IGBT); Capacitors; Computational modeling; Computer simulation; Datasheet; device-level model; diode; electrothermal; Emulation; field programmable gate array (FPGA); Field programmable gate arrays; Hardware; high voltage DC (HVDC) converters; Insulated gate bipolar transistors; Mathematical models; Metal matrix composites; Modular; modular multilevel converter (MMC); Modules; parallel processing; pipelining; Real time; Real-time systems; Simulation; Software; Transistors; field programmable gate array (FPGA); modular multilevel converter (MMC); device-level model; insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT); real-time systems; Datasheet; diode; electrothermal; high-voltage DC (HVDC) converters; parallel processing; pipelining
• ISSN: 0885-8993; 1941-0107
• DOI: 10.1109/TPEL.2015.2503281

Real-time simulation of modular multilevel converters (MMCs) is challenging due to their complex structure consisting of a large number of submodules (SMs). In the literature, the computational speed is emphasized for MMC modeling in real-time simulation, while accurate and detailed information of insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) modules in SMs is sacrificed. A novel datasheet-based device-level electrothermal model for an MMC on the field programmable gate array (FPGA) is presented in this paper for real-time hardware emulation. Conduction and switching power losses, junction temperatures, temperature-dependent electrical parameters, and linearized switching transient waveforms of IGBT modules are adequately captured in the proposed model. Simultaneously the system-level behavior of the MMC is accurately modeled. Five-level and nine-level MMC systems are emulated in the hardware with the time step of 10 μs and 10 ns for system-level and device-level computations, respectively. The paralleled and pipelined hardware design using IEEE 32-bit floating point number precision runs on Xilinx Virtex-7 XC7VX485T device. The emulated real-time results by an oscilloscope have been validated by offline simulation on SaberRD software.