Design of a Modular Multilevel Converter as an Active Front-End for a magnet supply application

The aim of this work is to describe the general design procedure of a Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC) applied as an Active Front-End (AFE) for a magnet supply for beam accelerators. The dimensioning criteria for the converter and the dc-link capacitance are presented and the grid transformer requirements are set. Considering the converter design, the arm inductance calculation is based on the specifications for the arm-current ripple and the DC-link fault tolerance, but, also, on the limitation of the second harmonic and the second-order LC resonance of the arm current. The module capacitance value is evaluated by focusing on the required switching dynamics and the capacitor-voltage ripple according to a newly proposed graphical method. The loading of each semiconductor in the half bridge is calculated via simulation, indicating the unsymmetrical current distribution. It is concluded that the current distribution for each semiconductor depends on the mode of operation of the converter. The different criteria for the choice of the number of modules per arm are discussed. Finally, the complete system, including a model for the load and the converter control strategy applied to the converter is simulated and obtained results are presented.