Phase-Unsynchronized Power Decoupling Control of MMC Based on Feedback Linearization

The traditional power decoupling control of modular multilevel converter (MMC) is based on the phase synchronization achieved by the phase-locked loop (PLL), and MMC intricate inner dynamics are ignored, which jeopardizes the system stability and power decoupling. To improve the performance, a nonlinear phase-unsynchronized power decoupling control for MMC is proposed without PLL. At first, the MMC model as a nonlinear multi-input multi-output system is developed. The developed model illustrates that the MMC power coupling is caused by the ac current as well as the MMC capacitor voltages. Then, through the input-output linearization method, the proposed method decouples the MMC output powers without the phase synchronization. Involving integral control, the dynamics of MMC output powers are designed as second-order systems so that the control parameters can be easily determined based on the required transient performance. To verify the accuracy and correctness of the developed model, a comparison of MMC dynamics with the proposed control is conducted between the numerical solution in MATLAB and the EMT simulation in PSCAD/EMTDC. Moreover, seven cases in the EMT simulations and four cases in the experimental results demonstrate the desired phase asynchronization and power decoupling performance of the proposed method compared with the conventional dq control. At last, the system zero dynamic stability is investigated and the influences of MMC control parameters, ac-side voltage, dc-side voltage and equilibrium points are analyzed to evaluate the stability performance of the proposed method.