Control and protection strategy for MMC MTDC system under converter-side AC fault during converter blocking failure

This paper investigates a control and protection strategy for a four-terminal modular multilevel converter(MMC)based high-voltage direct current(HVDC)system under a converter-side AC fault.Based on the system operating condition,a control and protection strategy against the fault with normal blocking of the converter is proposed.In practical,applications encountering such a fault,the MMC at the fault side may experience different conditions of blocking failure.The blocking failures may occur on:①the whole converter;②one converter arm;③one sub-module(SM)/several SMs of one converter arm;④other conditions.The phenomenon of the multi-terminal HVDC(MTDC)system following the fault is analyzed under the first three conditions with real-time simulations using the real-time digital simulator(RTDS).Based on the impact of different conditions on the MTDC system,the necessity of utilizing special control and protection is discussed.A special control and protection strategy is proposed for emergency conditions,and its effectiveness is verified by real-time simulation results.