Adaptive and Fault-tolerant Reactive Power Compensation in Power Systems via Multilevel Statcoms

Rapid and smooth reactive power compensation is crucial to maintain safe and reliable operation of power systems. This paper presents an adaptive and faulttolerant control (FTC) approach for reactive power compensation via a three-level cascaded STATCOM (static synchronous compensator). Two sets of FTC algorithms are derived to concurrently accommodate element/actuation faults, modeling uncertainties, system nonlinearities, as well as external disturbances. The resultant control scheme is fault-tolerant and adaptive, yet structurally simple and computationally inexpensive in that little information on system dynamics/parameters is needed for control setup and implementation and there is no need for complicated and costly process for fault-detection and identification. Such user-friendly features are deemed favorable in practical applications.