Fault tolerant operation strategy design for modular multilevel converters

In this paper a new post fault operation strategy is proposed for modular multilevel converter (MMC). The conventional MMC fault tolerant operation methods use redundant cells in spinning or cold reserve schemes, however in this work the MMC fault tolerant operation is achieved without requiring any redundant cells. The introduced strategy modifies capacitors reference voltages and arms modulation reference waveforms in faulty leg of MMC while other legs operate normally. The applied technique leads to having some degree of overvoltage in faulty leg capacitors which could be neglected since the number of cells is high. Simple realization and significant economic savings would be attained as main advantages of the proposed post fault operation strategy because of no need to redundant cells. Simulation results verify the good dynamic performance of the implemented technique.