Online monitoring method for submodule capacitors in modular multilevel converter based on cumulative sum detection of sliding window

Modular multilevel converters (MMC) have the characteristics of high modularity, good availability and high-power quality. Thus, they are widely used in medium and high-power applications. To meet large capacity application requirements, a large number of capacitors is applied in parallel and series. However, capacitors are one of the most vulnerable components in MMCs. To identify abnormal capacitors, a condition monitoring method for capacitors is proposed in this paper using the cumulative sum detection of the sliding window algorithm. First, the bilateral cumulative sum algorithm of the sliding window is proposed to extract the switch-on time and switch-off time of the submodules (SMs). Second, the capacitance is calculated using the monitored capacitor voltage and arm current during the switch-on status. Finally, the accuracy and effectiveness of the proposed method are verified by an MMC system operating condition simulated experiment platform. The proposed condition monitoring method simplifies the calculation of capacitance with a high accuracy by removing the requirement of measuring the switching signal. In addition, it does not have an adverse influence on the normal operation of MMC systems.