Development of a Hybrid Cascaded Converter based STATCOM with Reduced Switching Losses and Improved Fault Ride Through Capability

This article develops a static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) based on the hybrid cascaded converter which has the advantage of reduced number of power transistors and floating capacitors compared to the cascaded H-bridge converter. A hybrid modulation scheme is employed in the hybrid cascaded converter to reduce the switching losses while maintaining the output performance, and the corresponding dc capacitor voltage balancing control scheme is proposed. The laboratory test results are provided to verify the feasibility of the developed STATCOM and the effectiveness of the proposed scheme. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is compared with the conventional scheme to reveal the improvement in output quality, power losses, and even fault ride through capability.