Parallelization of MMC detailed equivalent model

Abstract This paper proposes a method to parallelize the computations of the detailed equivalent model of modular multilevel converter (MMC) on multicore CPUs in offline simulations of electromagnetic transients (EMTs). Each arm of the converter is implemented as a DLL independently from the main solver and is interfaced with it using standard procedures. It is also proposed to parallelize the capacitor balancing algorithm using a similar approach. Depending on the simulated system, the proposed method allows to accelerate simulations by five times without affecting accuracy of the results. Results also demonstrate that parallelization of the capacitor balancing algorithm plays an important role in improving simulation speed and can have a larger impact than the parallelization of electrical circuit equations.