Application of Tunnel Magnetoresistance to Health Monitoring of Modular Multilevel Converter Submodules

Modular multilevel converter (MMC) consists of a large number of submodules, health monitoring of the submodules is crucial to the reliability of the MMC. In this paper, we introduce a new non-contact current sensor called tunnel magnetoresistance (TMR), which not only can be used to protect the submodule’s IGBT from short-circuit failure, but also can be used to estimate the capacitor’s capacitance to monitor its health condition. According to the experimental results, an IGBT short-circuit fault can be protected in within 1.2 $\mu$ s and the maximum capacitance estimation error is less than 0.26%.

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