Special Session on Power conversion architectures and their building blocks for Solid State Transformer Application

The solid-state state transformer is an emerging technology and it have been intensively investigated in the last years. Different possible architectures have been described in the literature, and the modular concept is received more attention. The modular architecture is composed by several basic converter, as a building block of the complete architecture. However, there are still several open questions that are being currently investigated, such as: possible converters topologies to be used as the building block of modular solid-state transformer; design issues related to the high voltage isolation requirements and EMI, possible multilevel topologies and their modulation schemes for SST; fault tolerance scheme of the modular system, and also communication and control concepts (centralized/descentralized) for modular SST.

Moreover, the new technology wideband-gap (WBG)semiconductors is very promising to be used in the building block converter of the SST with the aim to improve the overall efficiency of the system. Although several research activities in respect of such devices are currently ongoing either in academia and industry, its advantage in SST application has not yet been demonstrated and it is very timely research topic. Regarding this emerging and promising area of research, this special session is aimed to promote fruitful experience interchanges and discussions on topics related to the implementation of the SST, covering the devices level, topologies level and architectures concepts and how to improve the overall system performance in terms of operation, efficiency, reliability and etc.