Assessment of Converter Performance in Hybrid AC-DC Power System under Optimal Power Flow with Minimum Number of DC Link Control Variables

This paper presents a strategy to evaluate the performances of converter stations under the optimized operating points of hybrid AC-DC power systems with a reduced number of DC link variables. Compared to previous works reported with five DC-side control variables (CVs), the uniqueness of the presented optimal power flow (OPF) formulation lies within the selection of only two DC-side control variables (CVs), such as the inverter voltage and current in the DC link, apart from the conventional AC-side variables. Previous research has mainly been focused on optimizing hybrid power system performance through OPF-based formulations, but has mostly ignored the associated converter performances. Hence, in this study, converter performance, in terms of ripple and harmonics in DC voltage and AC current and the utilization of the converter infrastructure, is evaluated. The minimization of active power loss is taken as an objective function, and the problem is solved for a modified IEEE 30 bus system using a recently developed and very efficient Archimedes optimization algorithm (AOA). Case studies are performed to assess the efficacy of the presented OPF model in power systems, as well as converter performance. Furthermore, the results are extended to assess the applicability of the proposed model to the allocation of photovoltaic (PV)-type distributed generations (DGs) in hybrid AC-DC systems. The average improvement in power loss is found to be around 7.5% compared to the reported results. Furthermore, an approximate 10% improvement in converter power factor and an approximate 50% reduction in ripple factor are achieved.