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Enhancing power electronics (PE) converter reliability is crucial for ensuring a reliable operation of current and future operating Wind Turbines (WTs). Achieving high reliability of variable speed WT PE systems requires careful consideration of their operation, and particularly their thermal cycling. This paper presents a methodology for evaluating and reconsidering operational strategies of WTs with relation to the thermal loading and lifetime consumption of the converter. The methodology is applied to compare control strategies for the WT generator and evaluate their impact on the converter reliability by observation of the thermal cycles and by calculating the resultant lifetime consumption of those stress cycles. The thermal stress on both the Machine Side Converter (MSC) and the Grid Side Converter (GSC) is examined and compared. It is shown that the least reliable of the three evaluated control strategies is the one that tracks the power curve below rated speed most closely. This paper suggests that dynamic transients associated with the WT control largely influence the IGBT module wear-out and their modelling needs to be prioritized for lifetime studies. These dynamic transients are captured by the improved model whose value is confirmed for the comparisons in the case study of the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a secondary Model Predictive Control (MPC) based architecture to provide DC voltage and DC power control to MT VSC-HVDC networks interfacing wind power generation. The proposed architecture places the controller at a supervisory level, thus providing coordination amongst existing converters’ local droop controllers. Droop control is a type of decentralized DC voltage/power control. Hence, in case of secondary controller failure, droop control acts as a contingency control scheme. A simplified linear dynamic model of the MT VSC-HVDC network is utilised for the MPC's design, thus minimizing computational effort needed to compute secondary control action. Updates of droop gains and offshore and onshore “AC” variables, in the dq domain, are explicitly considered as measured input disturbances within the formulation of the MPC controller, thus, ensuring appropriate control response in order to minimise adverse impact of their variation on the overall system's performance, particularly under wind power variations. Simulation results show that MPC, whose design is based on the system's simplified linear model, is capable of delivering satisfactory performance when applied to the high fidelity non-linear full order model of a six-terminal VSC-HVDC network simulated in PSCAD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis and control design of multi-terminal VSC-HVDC systems requires a linearised model of these inherently non-linear systems. This paper develops such a model, from converter to multi-terminal system, discusses the key concepts and shows its use for some test cases. The linearised model is simulated in Matlab, and it is compared against the non-linear model results from an established DEM PSCAD model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]