Paper published by Dr. Suman Debnath and Professor Maryam Saeedifard receives IEEE Industrial Society Best Transactions Paper Award Authored by Graduate Student
A paper published by Dr. Suman Debnath and Professor Maryam Saeedifard has received the IEEE Industrial Society Best Transactions Paper Award Authored by a Graduate Student.
The paper titled "Control and Stability Analysis of Modular Multilevel Converter Under Low-Frequency Operation" was published in IEEE Trans. on Industrial Electronics, vol. 62, no.9, pp. 5329-5339, 2015. The contribution of the paper is highlighted below.
The modular multilevel converter (MMC) has become one of the most attractive converter topologies for medium and high-voltage/power applications like HVDC systems due to its modularity and scalability. The salient features of the MMC make it a potential candidate for medium-voltage adjustable speed drive systems. Nevertheless, one of the main technical challenges associated with the operation of MMC under constant-torque low-speed operation of the MMC-based adjustable-speed drive system is the large magnitude of the submodule (SM) capacitor voltage ripple due to the inverse dependence of the SM capacitor voltage ripple on the speed of the machine. This leads to increased rating values of the converter and/or instability. The paper presents novel control strategies to reduce the SM capacitor voltage ripple under constant-torque low-speed operation of an MMC-based adjustable-speed drive system. The paper also proves the stability of the proposed control strategies based on Lyapunov analysis of singularly perturbed nonlinear nonautonomous systems.
The paper was a part of his Ph.D. thesis dissertation on “Control of modular multilevel converters for grid integration of full-scale wind energy conversion systems” (http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/dissertations/AAI3719160/). The thesis, apart from the research suggested by the title, also included a gradient-based cosimulation algorithm to optimize the controller parameters of a hybrid non-linear non-autonomous system.
Suman Debnath received his Ph.D. degree from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University in May 2015. He is currently a postdoctoral research associate at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He is involved in research on HVDC systems, wireless power transfer systems, and 3D printed solar inverters. He was advised by Professor Maryam Saeedifard, who is now at Georgia Tech.