Design and Control of Series Resonant Converters for DC Current Power Distribution Applications

With the growth of renewable energy usage and energy storage adoption in recent decades, people have started to reevaluate the possible roles of dc systems in current and future electrical systems. The dc voltage distribution has been applied in various applications, such as data centers and aircraft industry, for high efficiency and power density. However, for some applications such as subsea gas and oil fields, and ocean observatory systems, the dc current distribution is preferred over dc voltage distribution for its low cost and robustness against cable faults. Design and control of dc power distribution systems for different applications is an emerging research area with complex technical challenges. This dissertation solves the technical challenges in analysis, design, modeling, control and protection of series resonant converters (SRCs) for dc current distribution applications. An optimum design that has high efficiency, high reliability, and minimum required control efforts for the SRC with constant input current has been achieved and demonstrated by applying the analysis and design procedures developed in this dissertation. The modeling and analysis presented in this dissertation represents an operating condition that has not been studied in the literature and could be easily extended to other resonant converter topologies. Explicit analytical expressions have been provided for all key transfer functions, including input impedance and control-to-output, offering valuable resources to design feed-back regulation and to evaluate system stability. Based on the control strategies and control design presented in this dissertation, stable and reliable operation of dc current distribution systems with long distance cable has been achieved and demonstrated. The proposed analysis, design procedure, stability evaluation, control strategy and protection techniques in this dissertation can be applied to a wide range of similar scenarios as well, which greatly increases their value