Design of a Multilevel Inverter System Based STATCOM for Reliable Power System

Abstract

In an electrical power system, control of voltage is very essential for better and reliable operation of electrical equipments. A constant voltage profile and reactive power management in the transmission lines is very important to avoid any damage for e.g. overheating of motors and generators, to reduce the losses in the transmission lines and to improve the ability of a power system to withstand and prevent power outages. Reactive power compensator devices such as static synchronous compensator in the transmission lines provides the better management of reactive power, which further leads to more reliability and the commercial transactions can be done across the transmission lines. Nowadays, with the advancement of multilevel inverter field, static synchronous compensator devices with conventional inverters are completely obsolete and are replaced with multilevel inverters. This paper presents a novel technique for designing of a multilevel inverter based static synchronous compensator. The designed multilevel inverter based static synchronous compensator provides lower source current distortions and lower switching losses and is suitable for smart grid applications. The proposed model takes care of all the reactive power requirement of the load and therefore results in the reduction of total harmonic distortion and improved power factor.