An optimized cascaded multilevel static synchronous compensator for medium voltage distribution systems

Problems related to energy quality in medium voltage distribution systems have severely been affecting the industrial process, especially at the industries that work with complex plant processes, causing damages to the equipments and high financial losses. The necessity of a better energy quality for industry encourages the transition of the custom power equipments, typically used in low voltage systems, to work in medium voltage systems. This recent interest has been instigating researches from the power-electronics society. The multilevel power converters represent a potential breakthrough in employing switching equipments in medium voltage applications. In this context, studies related to multilevel topologies, modulation strategies and control circuits are presented in this paper in order to achieve an optimized multilevel distribution static synchronous compensator (DSTATCOM) to improve the power quality in industrial installations. Simulation results with all the contributions show the optimized performance of the compensator.