Outline of the design of a cascaded H-bridge medium voltage STATCOM

The University of Newcastle and its joint venture company, ResTech Pty Ltd, are developing a cascaded H-bridge based multilevel STATCOM. This tutorial paper outlines the salient design issues for this system. The issues covered in the paper include the choice of the converter topology, the structure of the control system hardware, the software structure and methodology, some details on the control algorithm, and the rationale behind the design decisions.