A High-efficiency air-cooling and waste heat utilization system for 100Mvar STATCOM

High-power STATCOM has been widely used in the power grid, and its rating can reach 100 MVA. Owing to the switching loss and conduction loss caused by the inherent characteristics of the power device, it generates MW-class heat during operation. Currently, these heats are discharged into the air by air-cooling or water-cooling. This will not only bring thermal pollution to the environment, but also result in high operation cost of high the cooling system. To solve the problem, a high-efficiency air-cooling and waste heat utilization system for STATCOM is proposed in this paper. It consists of high-efficiency heat pipe radiator, closed circulation air duct, heat pump unit, and waste heat recovery unit, etc. Based on a heat pump unit, it gets a closed-loop air-cooling heat dissipation for the valves of STATCOM, meanwhile recycles the waste heat from STATCOM to produce sanitary hot water around 60°C. Then, it provide this hot water to external hot water users. The program is practically applied in 500kV Chuanshan substation, and the field test confirms its feasibility.