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DC technology has gained considerable interest in the medium voltage applications due to the benefits over the AC counterpart. However, to utilize the full capacity of this development, the selection of a suitable power electronic converter topology is a key aspect. From the pool of voltage source converters (VSC's), it is unclear which topology is suitable for multi-megawatt applications at medium voltage dc (MVdc) levels. To address this, the paper proposes a selection guideline based on reliability and optimum redundancy levels of VSCs for MVdc applications. This will be combined with other functional factors such as operational efficiency and return-on-investment. Three candidate multi-level topologies namely three-level neutral point clamped converter (3L-NPC), modular multi-level converter (MMC) and cascaded 3L-NPC (which is being used for the first MVdc link in the U. K. ) have been evaluated over two-level-VSC from 10 kV to 50 kV. Results show that with the increase of MVdc voltage level MMC shows better performance whereas at low MVdc voltage levels 3L-NPC is the prominent topology.
Abeynayake et al. (Thu,) studied this question.