Abstract
This work compares six AC/DC power conversion chain topologies commonly employed by industrial companies for implementing electrolyzers. The main purpose is to help identify the eventual advantages of joining the traditional high-power rectifiers to an additional stage based on DC/DC conversion. The comparison is based on the current ripple, power factor, total harmonic distortion, scalability, and solution complexity. A Simulink model corresponding to each topology was developed to determine comparison criteria. The procedure consists of performing a steady-state analysis of each topology through simulations to obtain the main waveforms and the values of the established criteria and then calculating the scores for each technical solution. The findings indicated that the 24-pulse diode bridge rectifier plus DC-DC without interphase reactor exhibited the best performance. © 2024 IEEE.

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Abstract
Microgrids are able to improve several features of power systems, such as energy efficiencies, operating costs and environmental impacts. Nevertheless, microgrids' protection must work congruently with power distribution protection to safely take all advantages. This research contributes to enable their protection by proposing a bilevel method to simultaneously solve the allocation and coordination problems, where the proposed scheme also includes local protections of distributed energy resources. The uncertainties associated with generation and loads are categorized by the k-means method, as well. The non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm II is employed in the upper-level task to solve the protection and control devices allocation problem with two opposing objectives. In the lower-level task, a genetic algorithm ensures their coordination. Protection devices include reclosers and fuses from the network, and directional relays for the point of common coupling of microgrids, while control devices consist of remote-controlled switches. In contrast to related works, local devices installed at the point of coupling of distributed generation units are considered as well, such as voltage-restrained overcurrent relays and frequency relays. The optimal solution for the decision-maker is achieved by utilizing the compromise programming technique. Results show the importance of solving the allocation and coordination problems simultaneously, achieving up to $25,000 cost savings compared to cases that solve these problems separately. The integrated strategy allows the network operator to select the optimum solution for the protective system and avoid corrective actions afterward. The results also show the viability of the islanding operation depending on the decision maker's criteria.

Abstract
Wind power is becoming an important source of electrical energy production. In an onshore wind farm (WF), the electrical energy is collected at a substation from different wind turbines through electrical cables deployed over ground ditches. This work considers the WF layout design assuming that the substation location and all wind turbine locations are given, and a set of electrical cable types is available. The WF layout problem, taking into account its lifetime and technical constraints, involves selecting the cables to interconnect all wind turbines to the substation and the supporting ditches to minimize the initial investment cost plus the cost of the electrical energy that is lost on the cables over the lifetime of the WF. It is assumed that each ditch can deploy multiple cables, turning this problem into a more complex variant of previously addressed WF layout problems. This variant turns the problem best fitting to the real case and leads to substantial gains in the total cost of the solutions. The problem is defined as an integer linear programming model, which is then strengthened with different sets of valid inequalities. The models are tested with four WFs with up to 115 wind turbines. The computational experiments show that the optimal solutions can be computed with the proposed models for almost all cases. The largest WF was not solved to optimality, but the final relative gaps are small.