The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' (IEEE) Power Electronics Society (PELS) recently announced the winners of the 2024 Best Paper Awards for its flagship journal IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics (TPEL).

Professor Liu Jinjun's team from the Power Electronics and New Energy Technology Research Center at the School of Electrical Engineering of Xi'an Jiaotong University (XJTU) received both the Prize Letter Award and the Second Place Prize Paper Award.

The paper that won the Prize Letter Award is titled An Extension of Grid Forming: A Frequency-Following Voltage-Forming Inverter. It focuses on grid-forming stable control methods for new energy converters, proposing a control concept for frequency-following voltage-forming converters.

It decouples frequency and voltage control functions in conventional grid-forming systems and expands the grid-forming capabilities of power electronic converters.

The control method proposed in the paper can achieve rapid active power control and frequency-following response to the external power grid, while achieving voltage construction to the external power grid.

This method is applicable to a variety of scenarios where the DC side is a non-ideal DC power supply without additional energy storage devices, including photovoltaic power generation, wind power generation, static reactive power compensation, and flexible DC power transmission, and has broad application potential.

The paper that won the Second Place Prize Paper Award is titled A Novel Modular Magnetic-Coupled Converter (MMCC) for Medium-Voltage Motor Drive with Minimized DC Capacitance and Transformer Volume. It focuses on medium-voltage motor drive systems, proposing a megawatt-level converter circuit topology based on three-phase high-frequency magnetic coupling modules.

It uses full-resonant technology to form a low-impedance three-phase coupled magnetic circuit, causing the three-phase mutually different 120-degree machine-side low-frequency and grid-side double-frequency fluctuating power to naturally cancel out in the high-frequency magnetic circuit, achieving a minimized design for DC capacitor storage energy and transformer core weight.

Compared with classic cascaded H-bridge converters and modular multi-level converters, the DC capacitor stored energy is reduced by more than 67 percent and 97 percent, and the transformer core weight is reduced by more than 90 percent, providing theoretical guidance for the development of high power density medium-voltage megawatt-level conversion technology, and has considerable industrial application potential.