A Novel Distributed Supplementary Control of Multi-Terminal VSC-HVDC Grids for Rotor Angle Stability Enhancement of AC/DC Systems

This paper presents a distributed supplementary control for embedded Multi-Terminal VSC-HVDC (MTDC) grids to enhance the transient stability of the surrounding AC grid. Firstly, the need of supplementary controllers for embedded MTDC grids is demonstrated via the study of the Transient Energy Functions (TEF) of a simple hybrid AC/DC power system. Then, the proposed control structure is presented. This control aims to enhance the angle stability of the surrounding AC system via the modulation of the active power references of the converters. The objective of the control is to enhance AC transient stability while keeping the power balance of the DC grid even if converters reach their active power limits. The proposed control uses frequency, and angle measurements at the Point of Common Coupling (PCC) of the converters. The idea behind the proposed strategy is to match the control actions, and limits of each pair (i, j) of converters. If converter i modulates its power, converter j modulates the same amount of power in the opposite direction. The concept of virtual links is used in this paper to represent this matching. Finally, the proposed controller is tested on a modified version of the IEEE 39 bus system using EMT simulations.