Design and development of an 11kV H-bridge multilevel STATCOM

This tutorial paper outlines the design and development of a "state-of-the-art" 11 kV direct connection multilevel static compensator (STATCOM) based on cascaded H-bridges. This STATCOM is currently being developed at the University of Newcastle under a linkage project with industrial partner, ResTech Pty Ltd, which is a company jointly owned by Ampcontrol Pty Ltd and the University of Newcastle. This is a large scale project involving a high degree of innovation - there are currently no commercially available direct connect STATCOMs using this topology. The paper will concentrate on the hardware and software design issues.