The increasing penetration of offshore wind power generation promotes the revolution of wind turbine toward high-power application. The development of high-power wind turbine undoubtedly poses new technical challenges. This article presents a comprehensive overview for high-power wind energy conversion system (WECS) from key technique aspects, including topologies, stability, reliability, and ancillary service capability, and further investigates the key challenges and potential solutions. The various topologies of power converter applied in high-power wind turbine are first reviewed and discussed. The different semiconductor technology, including recent wide bandgap devices, and their potential contributions for offshore high-power converters are discussed. Furthermore, the potential stability issues of high-power WECS are investigated and reviewed. Also, the stabilization control strategies are discussed. Further, the reliability issue and enhancement strategies of high-power WECS are discussed, including condition monitoring, active thermal control strategy, and fault-tolerant operation method. In addition, the ancillary service capability of high-power WECS, including frequency-active power control capability and voltage-reactive power control capability, is reviewed. Finally, the future trends and potential solutions are discussed in this article.

The small time constants of power electronics devices lead to dynamic couplings with the electromagnetic transients of power networks, and thus complicate the modeling and stability analysis of power-electronics-based power systems. This paper presents a computationally efficient approach to assess the small-signal stability of inverter-fed power systems. The power system is partitioned into individual components, including the power inverters, network impedances, and power loads. The state-space model of individual inverter is first built, where the frequency response and eigenvalue analysis collectively characterize the contributions of different controller parameters to the terminal behavior in a wide frequency range. These component models, together with the network equations, are then algebraically assembled based on the interconnection relations at their terminals. As a consequence, the state matrix of the whole system, which is essential to the system stability analysis, can be reformulated in a computationally efficient way. The experimental results are finally given to validate the effectiveness of the modeling method and system stability analysis.

The modular multilevel converter (MMC) is attractive for medium or high-power applications because of the advantages of its high modularity, availability, and high power quality. Reliability is one of the most important challenges for the MMC consisting of a large number of submodules (SMs). The capacitor monitoring is one of the important issues in the MMC. This paper proposed a reference submodule (RSM)-based capacitor monitoring strategy for the capacitance estimation in the MMC, where the capacitances in the monitoring SMs can be estimated based on the capacitor voltage relationship between the RSM and the monitoring SMs. The proposed monitoring strategy does not rely on the information of all capacitor voltage and current, which effectively simplifies the algorithm for capacitance estimation. The simulation studies with the time-domain professional tool PSCAD/EMTDC are conducted and a down-scale MMC prototype is also tested in the laboratory with the proposed capacitor monitoring strategy. The study results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed capacitor monitoring strategy.

This paper presents a fault diagnosis method and system reconfiguration strategy of three level neutral-pointclamped cascaded inverter (3L-NPC-CI) to enhance reliability of power supply in electrified railway. First, neural network is employed to perform open-circuit fault diagnosis and identify fault switches. Then, system reconfiguration strategy is proposed to perform single phase 3L-NPC-CI reconfiguration. Through the analysis of the operation status of 3L-NPC, there are eight fault modes in single bridge arm, including single-switch fault and double-switches fault. By the feature analysis for the output arm voltage harmonic of normal and eight fault modes, seven harmonic parameters are selected as fault feature vectors. Meanwhile, a three-layer neural network is constructed, and the seven feature vectors are the input layer of the neural network. By training algorithm, the fault switches location can be identified accurately about one modulation period. Then, the fault module is bypassed and the 3L-NPC-CI system is stable by reconfiguring the modulation strategy of other normal modular. Simulation and experimental results are given to validate the proposed fault diagnosis and system reconfiguration strategy. The proposed method is able to improve robustness and reliability of 3L-NPCCI in traction power supply system.

Capacitance monitoring is one of the important issues for a modular multilevel converter (MMC) to obtain high reliability. Since pulsewidth modulation is usually implemented in the field-programmable gate array (FPGA), produced precise switching states in the FPGA cannot be directly accessed by the top digital signal processor (DSP) controller, which poses challenges to the existing capacitance monitoring methods based on precise switching states of the MMC. This article presents a submodule (SM) capacitance monitoring strategy for the MMC with a simple algorithm, where the fundamental frequency components of the SM capacitor voltage and current are extracted to estimate the SM capacitance based on reference, but not the precise switching states. The proposed scheme not only simplifies the implementation and calculation, but also avoids control limitations and heavy communication burden between the DSP and the FPGA. Besides, the proposed strategy effectively eliminates noise impact from sensors and increases accuracy. Simulation and experimental studies are implemented, and the results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed strategy.

Oscillation phenomena of offshore wind power plant (OWPP)in a wide frequency range can be caused due to impedance interactions between grid-connected inverters (GCIs) and transmission cables. In this paper, impedance model of GCI with outer power control loop, inner current control loop and phase-locked loop is first established in dq reference frame. The correctness is validated by frequency scanning method. Then, the effects of active and reactive power/current references on dq impedance characteristics of GCI with/without consideration of power control loop are investigated using complex space vectors and complex transfer functions. Furthermore, RLC circuit model of transmission cable considering frequency-dependent characteristics is also established for dq-domain IBSC. On the basis of them, it's found that low-frequency oscillation phenomena of OWPP under power control mode may occur if active power reference exceeds a certain threshold value, which can be mitigated by injecting a certain amount of negative reactive power. Impacts of PLL parameters, length of transmission cable and number of paralleled GCIs on required negative reactive power for low-frequency stabilization are further investigated. Both Matlab/Simulink-based simulation and OPAL-RT-based real-time verification are implemented in an OWPP with four permanent magnet synchronous generators to validate the correctness of the reactive power characteristic analysis.