Improvement of the dynamic response of the ITER Reactive Power Compensation system

Abstract The ITER ac/dc conversion system can absorb a total active and reactive power up to 500 MW and 950 Mvar, respectively. The Reactive Power Compensation (RPC) system is rated for a nominal power of 750 Mvar necessary to comply with the allowable reactive power limit value from the grid of 200 Mvar. This system is currently under construction and is based on Static Var Compensation technology with Thyristor Controlled Reactor (TCR) and Tuned Filters. The RPC has to minimize the demand of reactive power from the grid; its control is based on a feed-forward method, where the corrective input is the measurement of the reactive power consumption of the ac/dc converters, derived from the 50 Hz component of the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of the three-phase voltages and currents. The delay introduced by the FFT calculation and the slow response of the TCR could make the response speed of the RPC not sufficient to face fast variations of the reactive power demand and therefore in this paper a new controller of the RPC able to overcome this shortcoming is proposed and evaluated. It is based on the calculation of the predicted consumption of the reactive power by using the voltage reference signals coming from the Plasma Control System and the measurements of the dc current of the ac/dc converters and of the 66 kV busbar voltage, and on the speed up of the RPC control by introducing a lead–lag transfer function.