Dionne Soto

Area of research

Electrical and Electronic Engineering · Control and Systems Engineering

Research interest

Research topics from publications: Piezoelectrically Actuated Fast Mechanical Switch for MVDC Protection; Experimental verification of limiting fault currents in MVDC systems by using modular multilevel converters; Multifunctional megawatt scale medium voltage DC test bed based on modular multilevel converter (MMC) technology; Advances to megawatt scale demonstrations of high speed fault clearing and power restoration in breakerless MVDC shipboard power systems; A new class of high speed disconnect switch based on piezoelectric actuators; Short circuit output protection of MMC in voltage source control mode; High speed disconnect switch with piezoelectric actuator for medium voltage direct current grids; Power Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation Testing of a 200 MJ Battery-Based Energy Magazine for Shipboard Applications; Comparative study of intensive pulse load impact on active and passive rectification system in MVDC ship power generation unit; Modular multilevel converter based test bed for mvdc applications — A case study with a 12 kV, 5 MW setup. Representative work: Medium voltage direct current (MVDC) power systems are in their early phase of development, but the lack of efficient and reliable DC circuit breakers is currently one of the most significant bottlenecks for widespread adoption of MVDC applications. Compared to protection devices in high voltage direct current (HVDC) systems, MVDC circuit breakers are expected to interrupt fault currents with higher rates of rise in more power-dense and more controllable structures. A hybrid approach with a piezoelectrically actuated fast mechanical switch in parallel to a solid-state circuit breaker is expected to meet the above requirements. A prototype of a 15 kV-class piezoelectrically actuated fast mech Medium voltage direct current (MVDC) system poses an attractive technology for the development of high power all electric ships in the future. The Modular Multilevel Converter (MMC) is a potential candidate to be used as an AC/DC interface in fault current limited MVDC systems. A Controller Hardware in the Loop (CHIL) setup and the experimental setup have been designed for the initial verification of the fault current limiting function of MMC converters. A novel MMC averaged value model (AVM) is proposed in this paper for the purpose of emulating the DC side dynamics. The experimental results show that the

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