A review of smart transformer architectures and topologies

Smart transformer (ST), which has been classified among the 10 most emergent technologies according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has acquired growing importance in the distribution grid. This paper presents at first the concept of ST and its advantages in the power grid. Then, the existing topologies are reviewed and compared in order to select the most performing which is the three-stage topology. Moreover, the selected topology is simulated with its different architectures. Simulation results show the difference between architecture's performances regarding the power quality.