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Shenghui Cui

Publications and source records attributed to Shenghui Cui.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

Negative Resistance Caused by Intra-Loop Coupling in Virtual-Admittance-Based Grid-Forming Control

This paper addresses the harmonic instability problem of the virtual-admittance (VA)-based grid-forming control. It is revealed that the intra-loop coupling among the VA control, the inner-loop current control, and the voltage feedforward control results in an \(s^2\)-term in the equivalent output impedance of the inverter, which induces a negative-resistance property in the harmonic range. It is worth highlighting that this negative resistance is independent of the control delay. Consequently, this harmonic instability mechanism is fundamentally different from the extensively investigated cases in the literature, which are induced by the digital control delay of inverters. Then, a simple passivity-oriented damping control is proposed to mitigate the negative resistance arising from the intra-loop coupling. The method fully retains the well-established current controller and voltage feedforward, and does not require grid impedance information. Finally, experimental tests verify the theoretical findings and the effectiveness of the damping method.

eess.SY

Decoupled Internal Energy Regulation and Inertial Response Provision for Grid-Forming Multilevel-Converter-Based E-STATCOMs

As power systems accommodate higher shares of renewable generation, short-term power imbalances become more frequent and can manifest as pronounced voltage and frequency excursions under low-inertia conditions. E-STATCOMs (STATCOMs equipped with energy storage) offer a practical means to provide both voltage support and fast frequency assistance under grid-forming control. Among candidate implementations, double-star multilevel-converter (DS-MC)-based E-STATCOMs enable centralized energy-storage integration at the dc link, which improves thermal management and maintainability. Nevertheless, conventional dc-side power-based internal-energy regulation in DS-MCs can undesirably couple loss compensation to the energy-storage path, accelerating storage cycling and constraining operation when the storage is unavailable. This paper introduces a control strategy that assigns DS-MC total internal-energy regulation to the ac-side active-power path, while reserving dc-side storage power solely for frequency support. By decoupling internal-energy management from inertial-response provision, the proposed scheme enables flexible operation as either a STATCOM or an E-STATCOM according to storage availability and mitigates unnecessary storage cycling. The proposed strategy is verified through offline simulations and laboratory-scale experiments.

eess.SY

Mitigation of Structural Harmonic Instability in Virtual Admittance-Based Grid-Forming Inverters via Mimicking Skin Effect

The virtual admittance-current controller (VA-CC) scheme is widely employed to emulate an equivalent inductance in front of the internal voltage source of grid-forming inverters. However, recent studies have reported harmonic instabilities associated with VA-CC, motivating the need for a more physically interpretable understanding of their origin. This letter identifies a delay-independent structural mechanism of harmonic instability in the VA-CC scheme, wherein the interaction between the filter and virtual inductances introduces a non-passive second-order transfer-function term exhibiting negative resistance. To address this issue, a simple yet effective modification is proposed by integrating a parallel virtual resistor into the VA structure. This reconfiguration enhances the passivity of VA-CC scheme across the harmonic range by mimicking the skin effect which augments damping in high-frequency range, without altering the wellestablished current controller or voltage feedforward control. Experimental results validate that the proposed method achieves robust harmonic stability, whereas the conventional approach fails under identical grid conditions.

eess.SY

DSP-Based Sub-Switching-Period Current-Limiting Control for Grid-Tied Inverter under Grid Faults

This paper presents a sub-switching period current-limiting control for a grid-tied inverter to prevent transient overcurrents during grid faults and enable seamless fault ride-through (FRT). Sudden grid-voltage disturbances, such as voltage sags or phase jumps, can induce large transient currents within a switching period, particularly at low switching frequencies. Upon disturbance detection, the proposed method immediately modifies the pulse-width modulation carrier, enabling continuous regulation of the inverter output current within a time much shorter than a switching period without interrupting current flow. The proposed method can be implemented on commonly used digital signal processors without requiring specialized analog or digital circuits or high-speed computing devices. Experimental results from a 2-level, 3-phase inverter switching at 3.6 kHz validate the effectiveness of the proposed method under symmetric and asymmetric voltage sags and phase jumps.

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Accelerated Transformer Energization Sequence for Inverter Based Resources in Black-Start Procedures with Active Flux Trajectory Manipulation in the Stationary Reference Frame

This paper proposes advanced soft-magnetization techniques to enable ultra-fast and reliable black-start of grid-forming (GFM) converters. Conventional hard-magnetization with well-established three-phase voltages during transformer energization induces severe inrush currents due to flux offset, which can damage power semiconductor devices. To overcome this drawback, an ultra-fast soft-magnetization method is firstly introduced, leveraging the voltage programmability of the inverter to actively reshape the initial voltage profile and thereby eliminate flux offset of the transformer core. By suppressing the formation of flux offset itself, the proposed approach prevents magnetic saturation and achieves nominal terminal voltage within a few milliseconds while effectively suppressing inrush current. However, this method can still trigger surge currents to power semiconductor devices in the presence of an LC filter due to abrupt voltage magnitude and phase transitions. To address this issue, an enhanced Archimedean spiral soft-magnetization method is developed, where both voltage magnitude and phase evolve smoothly to simultaneously suppress inrush and surge currents. Furthermore, residual flux in the transformer core is considered, and a demagnetization sequence using the inverter is validated to ensure reliable start-up. Experimental results confirm that the proposed methods achieve rapid black-start performance within one fundamental cycle while ensuring safe and stable operation of GFM converters.

eess.SY

Transient Stability Analysis of Grid-Forming Converters with Current Limiting Considering Asymmetrical Grid Faults

Under asymmetrical faults, analyzing the transient stability of grid-forming voltage-source converters (GFM-VSCs) becomes essential because their behavior fundamentally differs from that under symmetrical faults. When current limiting is activated under asymmetrical faults, the point-of-common-coupling voltage of a GFM-VSC contains both positive- and negative-sequence components, and the interaction between these components generates a non-negligible negative-sequence-driven active power. However, the transient stability of GFM-VSCs under asymmetrical faults has not been sufficiently investigated, and the influence of negative-sequence-driven active power remains unclear. Accordingly, this letter derives the P-{\delta} curve of a GFM-VSC with an elliptical current limiter under asymmetrical faults by explicitly accounting for negative-sequence effects. This enables a more accurate transient stability assessment when extending conventional symmetrical-fault analyses to asymmetrical conditions. The theoretical analysis is validated by the agreement between the derived P-{\delta} curve and both simulation and experimental results.

eess.SY

Improved Decoupled Control of Modular Multilevel Converter under Constaint of Nearest Level Modulation via Disturbance Observer Design

Nearest level modulation (NLM) is an attractive modulation method for its implementation simplicity in modular multilevel converter (MMC). However, it introduces significant voltage and current distortion when the number of submodules (SMs) per arm is small, as in medium-voltage applications. While indirect modulation offers fully decoupled control of ac-side current, dc-side current and SM capacitor energy, its performance is fundamentally reliant on accurate arm voltage synthesis, making it incompatible with the large quantization error inherent in NLM. To resolve this conflict, this paper proposes a new control strategy based on a disturbance observer (DOB). The key idea is to estimate and actively compensate for the inevitable arm voltage synthesis error induced by NLM, thereby enabling fully decoupled control of indirect-modulated MMC even under NLM operation with a small number of SMs. A key advantage is its ease of implementation, as it requires no modifications to the conventional NLM and decoupled control structure. The validity and effectiveness of the proposed method in improving current quality and decoupled SM energy control are verified through both simulation and experimental results.

eess.SY

2DPASS: 2D Priors Assisted Semantic Segmentation on LiDAR Point Clouds

As camera and LiDAR sensors capture complementary information used in autonomous driving, great efforts have been made to develop semantic segmentation algorithms through multi-modality data fusion. However, fusion-based approaches require paired data, i.e., LiDAR point clouds and camera images with strict point-to-pixel mappings, as the inputs in both training and inference, which seriously hinders their application in practical scenarios. Thus, in this work, we propose the 2D Priors Assisted Semantic Segmentation (2DPASS), a general training scheme, to boost the representation learning on point clouds, by fully taking advantage of 2D images with rich appearance. In practice, by leveraging an auxiliary modal fusion and multi-scale fusion-to-single knowledge distillation (MSFSKD), 2DPASS acquires richer semantic and structural information from the multi-modal data, which are then online distilled to the pure 3D network. As a result, equipped with 2DPASS, our baseline shows significant improvement with only point cloud inputs. Specifically, it achieves the state-of-the-arts on two large-scale benchmarks (i.e. SemanticKITTI and NuScenes), including top-1 results in both single and multiple scan(s) competitions of SemanticKITTI.

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