The growth of energy demands in recent years has been increasing faster than the expansion of transmission facility construction. This tendency cooperating with the continuous investing on the renewable energy resources drives the research, development, and construction of HVDC projects to create a more reliable, affordable, and environmentally friendly power grid.

Constructing the hybrid AC-HVDC grid is a significant move in the development of the HVDC techniques; the form of dc system is evolving from the point-to-point stand-alone dc links to the embedded HVDC system and the multi-terminal HVDC (MTDC) system. The MTDC is a solution for the renewable energy interconnections, and the MTDC grids can improve the power system reliability, flexibility in economic dispatches, and converter/cable utilizing efficiencies.

The dissertation reviews the HVDC technologies, discusses the stability issues regarding the ac and HVDC connections, proposes a novel power oscillation control strategy to improve system stability, and develops a nonlinear voltage droop control strategy for the MTDC grid.

To verify the effectiveness the proposed power oscillation control strategy, a long distance paralleled AC-HVDC transmission test system is employed. Based on the PSCAD/EMTDC platform simulation results, the proposed power oscillation control strategy can improve the system dynamic performance and attenuate the power oscillations effectively.

To validate the nonlinear voltage droop control strategy, three droop controls schemes are designed according to the proposed nonlinear voltage droop control design procedures. These control schemes are tested in a hybrid AC-MTDC system. The hybrid AC-MTDC system, which is first proposed in this dissertation, consists of two ac grids, two wind farms and a five-terminal HVDC grid connecting them. Simulation studies are performed in the PSCAD/EMTDC platform. According to the simulation results, all the three design schemes have their unique salient features.

The presence of distributed generation in high renewable energy penetration system increases the complexity for fault detection as the power flow is bidirectional. The conventional protection scheme is not sufficient for the bidirectional power flow system, hence a fast and accurate protection scheme needs to be developed.

This thesis mainly deals with the design and validation of the protection system based on the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management (FREEDM) system, which is a bidirectional power flow loop system. The Large-Scale System Simulation (LSSS) is a system level PSCAD model which is used to validate component models for different time-scale platforms to provide a virtual testing platform for the Future Renewable Electric Energy Delivery and Management (FREEDM) system. It is also used to validate the cases of power system protection, renewable energy integration and storage, and load profiles. The protection of the FREEDM system against any abnormal condition is one of the important tasks. Therefore, the pilot directional protection scheme based on wireless communication is used in this thesis. The use of wireless communication is extended to protect the large scale meshed distributed generation from any fault. The complete protection system consists of the main protection and the back-up protection which are both presented in the thesis. The validation of the protection system is performed on a radial system test bed using commercial relays at the ASU power laboratory, and on the RTDS platform (Real Time Digital Power System) in CAPS (Center for Advanced Power System) Florida. Considering that the commercial relays have limitations of high cost and communicating with fault isolation devices, a hardware prototype using the interface between the ADC (analog to digital converter) and MATLAB software is developed, which takes advantage of economic efficiency and communication compatibility. Part of this research work has been written into a conference paper which was presented by IEEE Green Tech Meeting, 2017.

Two major challenges in the transformer-less, single-phase PV string inverters are common mode leakage currents and double-line-frequency power decoupling. In the proposed doubly-grounded inverter topology with innovative active-power-decoupling approach, both of these issues are simultaneously addressed. The topology allows the PV negative terminal to be directly connected to the neutral, thereby eliminating the common-mode ground-currents. The decoupling capacitance requirement is minimized by a dynamically-variable dc-link with large voltage swing, allowing an all-film-capacitor implementation. Furthermore, the use of wide-bandgap devices enables the converter operation at higher switching frequency, resulting in smaller magnetic components. The operating principles, design and optimization, and control methods are explained in detail, and compared with other transformer-less, active-decoupling topologies. A 3 kVA, 100 kHz single-phase hardware prototype at 400 V dc nominal input and 240 V ac output has been developed using SiC MOSFETs with only 45 μF/1100 V dc-link capacitance. The proposed doubly-grounded topology is then extended for split-phase PV inverter application which results in significant reduction in both the peak and RMS values of the boost stage inductor current and allows for easy design of zero voltage transition. A topological enhancement involving T-type dc-ac stage is also developed which takes advantage of the three-level switching states with reduced voltage stress on the main switches, lower switching loss and almost halved inductor current ripple.

In addition, this thesis also proposed two new schemes to improve the efficiency of conventional H-bridge inverter topology. The first scheme is to add an auxiliary zero-voltage-transition (ZVT) circuit to realize zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) for all the main switches and inherent zero-current-switching (ZCS) for the auxiliary switches. The advantages include the provision to implement zero state modulation schemes to decrease the inductor current THD, naturally adaptive auxiliary inductor current and elimination of need for large balancing capacitors. The second proposed scheme improves the system efficiency while still meeting a given THD requirement by implementing variable instantaneous switching frequency within a line frequency cycle. This scheme aims at minimizing the combined switching loss and inductor core loss by including different characteristics of the losses relative to the instantaneous switching frequency in the optimization process.

This thesis investigates different unidirectional topologies for the on-board charger in an electric vehicle and proposes soft-switching solutions in both the AC/DC and DC/DC stage of the converter with a power rating of 3.3 kW. With an overview on different charger topologies and their applicability with respect to the target specification a soft-switching technique to reduce the switching losses of a single phase boost-type PFC is proposed. This work is followed by a modification to the popular soft-switching topology, the dual active bridge (DAB) converter for application requiring unidirectional power flow. The topology named as the semi-dual active bridge (S-DAB) is obtained by replacing the fully active (four switches) bridge on the load side of a DAB by a semi-active (two switches and two diodes) bridge. The operating principles, waveforms in different intervals and expression for power transfer, which differ significantly from the basic DAB topology, are presented in detail. The zero-voltage switching (ZVS) characteristics and requirements are analyzed in detail and compared to those of DAB. A small-signal model of the new configuration is also derived. The analysis and performance of S-DAB are validated through extensive simulation and experimental results from a hardware prototype.



Secondly, a low-loss auxiliary circuit for a power factor correction (PFC) circuit to achieve zero voltage transition is also proposed to improve the efficiency and operating frequency of the converter. The high dynamic energy generated in the switching node during turn-on is diverted by providing a parallel path through an auxiliary inductor and a transistor placed across the main inductor. The paper discusses the operating principles, design, and merits of the proposed scheme with hardware validation on a 3.3 kW/ 500 kHz PFC prototype. Modifications to the proposed zero voltage transition (ZVT) circuit is also investigated by implementing two topological variations. Firstly, an integrated magnetic structure is built combining the main inductor and auxiliary inductor in a single core reducing the total footprint of the circuit board. This improvement also reduces the size of the auxiliary capacitor required in the ZVT operation. The second modification redirects the ZVT energy from the input end to the DC link through additional half-bridge circuit and inductor. The half-bridge operating at constant 50% duty cycle simulates a switching leg of the following DC/DC stage of the converter. A hardware prototype of the above-mentioned PFC and DC/DC stage was developed and the operating principles were verified using the same.

With the status of nuclear proliferation around the world becoming more and more complex, nuclear forensics methods are needed to restrain the unlawful usage of nuclear devices. Lithium-ion batteries are present ubiquitously in consumer electronic devices nowadays. More importantly, the materials inside the batteries have the potential to be used as neutron detectors, just like the activation foils used in reactor experiments. Therefore, in a nuclear weapon detonation incident, these lithium-ion batteries can serve as sensors that are spatially distributed.

In order to validate the feasibility of such an approach, Monte Carlo N-Particle (MCNP) models are built for various lithium-ion batteries, as well as neutron transport from different fission nuclear weapons. To obtain the precise battery compositions for the MCNP models, a destructive inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICP-MS) analysis is utilized. The same battery types are irradiated in a series of reactor experiments to validate the MCNP models and the methodology. The MCNP nuclear weapon radiation transport simulations are used to mimic the nuclear detonation incident to study the correlation between the nuclear reactions inside the batteries and the neutron spectra. Subsequently, the irradiated battery activities are used in the SNL-SAND-IV code to reconstruct the neutron spectrum for both the reactor experiments and the weapon detonation simulations.

Based on this study, empirical data show that the lithium-ion batteries have the potential to serve as widely distributed neutron detectors in this simulated environment to (1) calculate the nuclear device yield, (2) differentiate between gun and implosion fission weapons, and (3) reconstruct the neutron spectrum of the device.

After a major disturbance, the power system response is highly dependent on protection schemes and system dynamics. Improving power systems situational awareness requires proper and simultaneous modeling of both protection schemes and dynamic characteristics in power systems analysis tools. Historical information and ex-post analysis of blackouts reaffirm the critical role of protective devices in cascading events, thereby confirming the necessity to represent protective functions in transient stability studies. This dissertation is aimed at studying the importance of representing protective relays in power system dynamic studies. Although modeling all of the protective relays within transient stability studies may result in a better estimation of system behavior, representing, updating, and maintaining the protection system data becomes an insurmountable task. Inappropriate or outdated representation of the relays may result in incorrect assessment of the system behavior. This dissertation presents a systematic method to determine essential relays to be modeled in transient stability studies. The desired approach should identify protective relays that are critical for various operating conditions and contingencies. The results of the transient stability studies confirm that modeling only the identified critical protective relays is sufficient to capture system behavior for various operating conditions and precludes the need to model all of the protective relays. Moreover, this dissertation proposes a method that can be implemented to determine the appropriate location of out-of-step blocking relays. During unstable power swings, a generator or group of generators may accelerate or decelerate leading to voltage depression at the electrical center along with generator tripping. This voltage depression may cause protective relay mis-operation and unintentional separation of the system. In order to avoid unintentional islanding, the potentially mis-operating relays should be blocked from tripping with the use of out-of-step blocking schemes. Blocking these mis-operating relays, combined with an appropriate islanding scheme, help avoid a system wide collapse. The proposed method is tested on data from the Western Electricity Coordinating Council. A triple line outage of the California-Oregon Intertie is studied. The results show that the proposed method is able to successfully identify proper locations of out-of-step blocking scheme.

With the increasing penetration of Photovoltaic inverters, there is a necessity for recent PV inverters to have smart grid support features for increased power system reliability and security. The grid support features include voltage support, active and reactive power control. These support features mean that inverters should have bidirectional power and communication capabilities. The inverter should be able to communicate with the grid utility and other inverter modules.

This thesis studies the real time simulation of smart inverters using PLECS Real Time Box. The real time simulation is performed as a Controller Hardware in the Loop (CHIL) real time simulation. In this thesis, the power stage of the smart inverter is emulated in the PLECS Real Time Box and the controller stage of the inverter is programmed in the Digital Signal Processor (DSP) connected to the real time box. The power stage emulated in the real time box and the controller implemented in the DSP form a closed loop smart inverter.

This smart inverter, with power stage and controller together, is then connected to an OPAL-RT simulator which emulates the power distribution system of the Arizona State University Poly campus. The smart inverter then sends and receives commands to supply power and support the grid. The results of the smart inverter with the PLECS Real time box and the smart inverter connected to an emulated distribution system are discussed under various conditions based on the commands received by the smart inverter.

In the recent past, due to regulatory hurdles and the inability to expand transmission systems, the bulk power system is increasingly being operated close to its limits. Among the various phenomenon encountered, static voltage stability has received increased attention among electric utilities. One approach to investigate static voltage stability is to run a set of power flow simulations and derive the voltage stability limit based on the analysis of power flow results. Power flow problems are formulated as a set of nonlinear algebraic equations usually solved by iterative methods. The most commonly used method is the Newton-Raphson method. However, at the static voltage stability limit, the Jacobian becomes singular. Hence, the power flow solution may fail to converge close to the true limit.

To carefully examine the limitations of conventional power flow software packages in determining voltage stability limits, two lines of research are pursued in this study. The first line of the research is to investigate the capability of different power flow solution techniques, such as conventional power flow and non-iterative power flow techniques to obtain the voltage collapse point. The software packages used in this study include Newton-based methods contained in PSSE, PSLF, PSAT, PowerWorld, VSAT and a non-iterative technique known as the holomorphic embedding method (HEM).

The second line is to investigate the impact of the available control options and solution parameter settings that can be utilized to obtain solutions closer to the voltage collapse point. Such as the starting point, generator reactive power limits, shunt device control modes, area interchange control, and other such parameters.

Alternate sources of energy such as wind, solar photovoltaic and fuel cells are coupled to the power grid with the help of solid state converters. Continued deregulation of the power sector coupled with favorable government incentives has resulted in the rapid growth of renewable energy sources connected to the distribution system at a voltage level of 34.5kV or below. Of late, many utilities are also investing in these alternate sources of energy with the point of interconnection with the power grid being at the transmission level. These converter interfaced generation along with their associated control have the ability to provide the advantage of fast control of frequency, voltage, active, and reactive power. However, their ability to provide stability in a large system is yet to be investigated in detail. This is the primary objective of this research.

In the future, along with an increase in the percentage of converter interfaced renewable energy sources connected to the transmission network, there exists a possibility of even connecting synchronous machines to the grid through converters. Thus, all sources of energy can be expected to be coupled to the grid through converters. The control and operation of such a grid will be unlike anything that has been encountered till now. In this dissertation, the operation and behavior of such a grid will be investigated. The first step in such an analysis will be to build an accurate and simple mathematical model to represent the corresponding components in commercial software. Once this bridge has been crossed, conventional machines will be replaced with their solid state interfaced counterparts in a phased manner. At each stage, attention will be devoted to the control of these sources and also on the stability performance of the large power system.

This dissertation addresses various concerns regarding the control and operation of a futuristic power grid. In addition, this dissertation also aims to address the issue of whether a requirement may arise to redefine operational reliability criteria based on the results obtained.

Presently, hard-switching buck/boost converters are dominantly used for automotive applications. Automotive applications have stringent system requirements for dc-dc converters, such as wide input voltage range and limited EMI noise emission. High switching frequency of the dc-dc converters is much desired in automotive applications for avoiding AM band interference and for compact size. However, hard switching buck converter is not suitable at high frequency operation because of its low efficiency. In addition, buck converter has high EMI noise due to its hard-switching. Therefore, soft-switching topologies are considered in this thesis work to improve the performance of the dc-dc converters.

Many soft-switching topologies are reviewed but none of them is well suited for the given automotive applications. Two soft-switching PWM converters are proposed in this work. For low power automotive POL applications, a new active-clamp buck converter is proposed. Comprehensive analysis of this converter is presented. A 2.2 MHz, 25 W active-clamp buck converter prototype with Si MOSFETs was designed and built. The experimental results verify the operation of the converter. For 12 V to 5 V conversion, the Si based prototype achieves a peak efficiency of 89.7%. To further improve the efficiency, GaN FETs are used and an optimized SR turn-off delay is employed. Then, a peak efficiency of 93.22% is achieved. The EMI test result shows significantly improved EMI performance of the proposed active-clamp buck converter. Last, large- and small-signal models of the proposed converter are derived and verified by simulation.

For automotive dual voltage system, a new bidirectional zero-voltage-transition (ZVT) converter with coupled-inductor is proposed in this work. With the coupled-inductor, the current to realize zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) of main switches is much reduced and the core loss is minimized. Detailed analysis and design considerations for the proposed converter are presented. A 1 MHz, 250 W prototype is designed and constructed. The experimental results verify the operation. Peak efficiencies of 93.98% and 92.99% are achieved in buck mode and boost mode, respectively. Significant efficiency improvement is achieved from the efficiency comparison between the hard-switching buck converter and the proposed ZVT converter with coupled-inductor.