Isomorphic Circuit Clustering for Fast and Accurate Electromagnetic Transient Simulations of MMCs

Modular multilevel converters have become the technology of choice in high voltage direct current systems. They are composed of a large number of submodules, which poses significant computational challenges to electromagnetic transient simulations. To address this issue, scholars proposed several approaches that are a trade-off between simulation accuracy and computational burden, which mainly achieve numerical efficiency by adopting reduced and simplified models of the converter arm submodules. This paper proposes a different simulation paradigm based on sub-circuit isomorphism. It is suited for the analysis of intrinsically modular electronic circuits, as it exploits the common behavior of structurally identical submodules by clustering them together. This method does not require any simplification of the submodule electrical model and minimizes the number of equations to be solved at each time step of the time domain analysis, thereby significantly reducing the computational effort. Thus, this method is suitable for thorough simulations of ac/dc networks, which may require the implementation of detailed transistor-level representations of the converter submodules.