This thesis presents an electrical system analysis of a wave energy converter (WEC) for the objective of grid connection. To transfer the enormous amount of power from waves to the load centers, efficient power electronic systems are essential. This thesis includes the modeling of a buoy–translator dynamics and the modeling of a linear permanent magnet generator along with simulation and experimental validation. Diode bridge rectifiers are considered for rectification to avoid the complex linear generator control at the input side. To reduce the size and the cost of energy storage elements, DC voltage regulation is done using a DC/DC converter.

To achieve smooth and high power, many WECs need to be connected to a common DC link. A neutral point clamped inverter is considered for the DC/AC conversion due to its advantages over conventional topologies. Various pulse width modulation schemes are tested for the inverter to choose the optimum PWM method. The harmonics in the inverter output voltage is derived numerically and compared with simulation and experiment to understand the effect of dead-time in the inverter operation.

Depending on the load current drawn from the inverter, the voltages in the two input capacitors of a three-level neutral point clamped inverter deviates from equilibrium unless the neutral point is grounded. To avoid this voltage imbalance as well as to regulate the DC link voltage a dual output boost converter with pulse delay control is proposed. The modeling, simulation and experiments show an improvement in the compensation voltage using pulse delay control compared to the previously proposed methods in the literature. The synchronous current control and the grid connection of the three-level converter have been accomplished in the laboratory. 

Finally, the three-level power converter system has been tested with a linear permanent magnet generator at Lysekil to analyze the controller requirements.

The main focus of this thesis is on the power electronic converter system challenges associated with the grid integration of variable-renewable-energy (VRE) sources like wave, marine current, tidal, wind, solar etc. Wave energy conversion with grid integration is used as the key reference, considering its high energy potential to support the future clean energy requirements and due the availability of a test facility at Uppsala University. The emphasis is on the DC-link power conditioning and grid coupling of direct driven wave energy converters (DDWECs). The DDWEC reflects the random nature of its input energy to its output voltage wave shape. Thereby, it demands for intelligent power conversion techniques to facilitate the grid connection.

One option is to improve and adapt an already existing, simple and reliable multilevel power converter technology, using smart control strategies. The proposed WECs to grid interconnection system consists of uncontrolled three-phase rectifiers, three-level boost converter(TLBC) or three-level buck-boost converter (TLBBC) and a three-level neutral point clamped (TLNPC) inverter. A new method for pulse delay control for the active balancing of DC-link capacitor voltages by using TLBC/TLBBC is presented. Duty-ratio and pulse delay control methods are combined for obtaining better voltage regulation at the DC-link and for achieving higher controllability range. The classic voltage balancing problem of the NPC inverter input, is solved efficiently using the above technique. A synchronous current compensator is used for the NPC inverter based grid coupling. Various results from both simulation and hardware testing show that the required power conditioning and power flow control can be obtained from the proposed multilevel multistage converter system.

The entire control strategies are implemented in Xilinx Virtex 5 FPGA, inside National Instruments’ CompactRIO system using LabVIEW. A contour based dead-time harmonic analysis method for TLNPC and the possibilities of having various interconnection strategies of WEC-rectifier units to complement the power converter efforts for stabilizing the DC-link, are also presented. An advanced future AC2AC direct power converter system based on Modular multilevel converter (MMC) structure developed at Siemens AG is presented briefly to demonstrate the future trends in this area.