Subhadeep Bhattacharya of Schneider Electric

Utility-scale solar power plants have seen tremendous growth in recent years. These plants typically range from a few megawatts to hundreds of megawatts, and connect either to the utility’s distribution or transmission systems where technical interconnection requirements vary within different regions of the world.

This presentation will provide an overview of the technical challenges and accomplishments made in this field in recent years from an industrial point of view. The key technical requirements for system interconnections and their impacts on the design of the solar plant will be looked at. Furthermore, it will discuss a few of the contributions and successes of Schneider Electric Solar’s Conext SmartGen Utility Scale Solar Inverter. The presentation will end with a discussion of a few technical design challenges ahead.

Biography:

Subhadeep Bhattacharya received the B.E. degree from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India, in 2009, the M.Tech. degree from IIT Bombay, Mumbai, India, in 2011, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada, in 2016. While doing his doctorate studies, he worked as a MITACS accelerate intern with TM4 Inc., Boucherville, QC, and afterwards, he worked there as a system control designer working on electric vehicle chargers, and traction drive control design. 

Since January 2018, he has been working as an inverter control engineer at Schneider Electric Solar, Burnaby, BC.  His current research interests include power electronics design and control for utility scale renewable generators and distributed generation. 

Dr. Emanuel Serban of Schneider Electric

Photovoltaic solar systems require innovative solutions to improve the performance and efficiency in power conversion. In this research, improved efficiency is analyzed through the modulation strategies in three-phase T-type Neutral Point Clamped (3L-TNPC) inverters.  Three phase solar inverters can be operated with different modulation strategies such as sinusoidal pulse-width modulation (SPWM), space vector modulation (SVM), third-harmonic injection PWM (THIPWM). An analytical approach for loss expressions provides the insights for further analysis and improvement of power conversion losses.

A detailed exploration of traditional SPWM and SVM is presented and a new modified modulation strategy referred to as two-triplen harmonic injection PWM (2THIPWM) which can substitute the SVM scheme. Analytical expressions are derived for the proposed 2THIPWM strategy which can be used for the SVM power-loss approximation. Under the same inverter operation conditions, the comparison between 2THIPWM and SPWM shows a conduction-loss difference greater than the 5% normalized range. The on-line control between different modulation schemes leads to improved conduction losses. The theoretical and experimental results obtained, using a 3L-TNPC solar inverter, are presented to evaluate the modulation strategies and their impact on performance.

Biography:

Emanuel Serban (M’99-SM’09) received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in electrical engineering from Polytechnic University of Timisoara, Romania in 1994 and 1995, respectively. In 2017 he received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering and Computing Science at University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

In 1997 he joined Xantrex Technology Inc. where he developed several power electronics platforms for industry and renewable backup applications.

Since 2009, he has been with the Solar Business at Schneider Electric, Vancouver, B.C. Canada, where he is Research & Development Chief Engineer, Power Electronics Design, responsible for hybrid distributed power systems, renewable multi-level converters architecture and platform design. He developed single-phase and three-phase converter platforms for Residential and Commercial solar and electrical energy storage applications.

Dr. Serban is the holder of two patents on photovoltaic and energy storage systems. He has intensive contribution in research and development of power electronics products deployed worldwide.

His main fields of interest are in power electronics modeling and control, analysis and design of power converters for renewable, storage and distributed energy systems.