Design Consideration of Converter Based Transmission Line Emulation

Ac transmission line emulator is the bridge to interconnect ac systems to fulfill the grid emulation function, where all the emulator elements such as generators, loads and lines are implemented by universal three-phase voltage source converters. In this paper, three design issues are addressed. First, the impact of ac voltage switching noise on the performance of a transmission line emulator in terms of steady state and dynamic accuracy is described, and an improved sampling algorithm is presented. Then, a new dc offset controller is proposed to mitigate the induced dc current flow by sampled dc offset noise, to guarantee the normal operation of ac line emulator. Furthermore, the stability issues regarding different emulation schemes are analyzed, providing a metric to predict the feasible impedance range that a line emulator can reach and to choose the proper emulation strategy for a specific system. Finally, experimental results obtained from a multi-converter based hardware testbed verify the design schemes.