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A modular multilevel converter control system, based on converter energy storage, is proposed in this paper for two different control modes: active power and dc voltage. The proposed control system decouples the submodule (SM) capacitor voltages from the dc bus voltage. One of the practical applications is the management of active redundant SMs. A practical HVDC system with 401-level MMCs, including 10% redundancy in MMC SMs, is used for validating and demonstrating the advantages of the proposed control system. This paper also presents a novel capacitor voltage balancing control based on \max–\min functions. It is used to drastically reduce the number of switchings for each SM and enhances computational efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When investigating voltage and current stresses in critical main circuit components during faults of the converter, a detailed equivalent model capable of representing the balancing control strategies of the capacitor voltages on the submodule level, along with blocking and delocking, is always necessary. Among previously proposed equivalent models of the modular multilevel converter (MMC), only submodule averaged models (SAMs) can capture interested inner dynamics inside each arm. However, the simulation accuracy of SAMs is not always satisfactory, especially when the time step is larger than 10 $\mu$s. In order to further improve the simulation accuracy with guaranteed simulation efficiency, the shifted frequency modeling of the half- and full-bridge hybrid MMC is proposed in this paper. Therein, each submodule is represented by Thévenin equivalents derived by submodule dynamic phasors. The arm of the MMC is represented by Norton equivalents to guarantee the efficiency, considering both normal and dc-blocking conditions. The effectiveness of the proposed model in terms of accuracy and efficiency is validated by simulating an MMC-based HVdc transmission. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of semiconductor switches in a modular multilevel converter (MMC) for HVDC transmission is typically two orders of magnitudes larger than that in a two or three level voltage-sourced converter (VSC). The large number of devices creates a computational challenge for electromagnetic transient simulation programs, as it can significantly increase the simulation time. The paper presents a method based on partitioning the system's admittance matrix and deriving an efficient time-varying Thévenin's equivalent for the converter part. The proposed method does not make use of approximate interfaced models, and mathematically, is exactly equivalent to modelling the entire network (converter and external system) as one large network. It is shown to drastically reduce the computational time without sacrificing any accuracy. The paper also presents control algorithms and other modelling aspects. The efficacy of the proposed method is demonstrated by simulating a point-to-point VSC-MMC-based HVDC transmission system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]