Electro-Thermal Design of a Heat Pipe Based High Power Voltage Source Converter Using Emitter Turn-Off Thyristor

Flexible AC transmission system (FACTS) applications are gaining more popularity and have been given a great impetus by the development of multilevel converters for high power applications. In this paper, a high power modular voltage source converter (VSC) is developed based on the newly developed emitter turn-off thyristor (ETO). In order to achieve this modular functionality, heat pipes are used as the cooling system, replacing the traditional water based cooling method. Through the use of non-isolated heat pipes, we can avoid the electrical isolation issue of cooling system in high voltage FACTS application. The heat pipe also helps to increase the VSCs power density and reliability by reducing the amount of pipes used and reduction of components counts. The hardware configuration, thermal calculation as well as component selection and design are presented in this paper