• IEIE Transactions on Smart Processing and Computing
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• v.5 no.1
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• pp.35-42
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• 2016

Developments in power electronics have enabled the widespread application of Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) inverters, notably for connecting renewable systems to the grid. This study demonstrates that a high-quality power can be achieved using a stand-alone inverter, whereby the comparison between the power quality of the stand-alone inverter with battery storage (off-grid) and the power quality of the utility network is presented. Multi-loop control techniques for a single phase stand-alone inverter are used. A capacitor current control is used to give active damping and enhance the transient and steady state inverter performance. A capacitor current control is cheaper than the inductor current control, where a small current sensing resistor is used. The output voltage control is used to improve the system performance and also control the output voltage. The inner control loop uses a proportional gain current controller and the outer loop is implemented using internal model control proportional-integral-derivative to ensure stability. The optimal controls are achieved by using the Sisotool tool in MATLAB/Simulink. The outcome of the control scheme of the numerical model of the stand-alone inverter has a smooth and good dynamic performance, but also a strong robustness to load variations. The numerical model of the stand-alone inverter and its power quality are presented, and the power quality is shown to meet the IEEE 519-2014. Furthermore, the power quality of the off-grid system is measured experimentally and compared with the grid power, showing power quality of off-grid system to be better than that of the utility network.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.1554-1565
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• 2019

When grid voltage is unbalanced, the grid-connected output current and power of Virtual Synchronous Generators (VSGs) are distorted and quadratic. In order to improve the power quality of a grid connected to a VSG when the grid voltage is unbalanced, a comprehensive coordinated control strategy is proposed. The strategy uses the positive sequence current reference command obtained by a VSG in the balanced current control mode to establish a unified negative sequence current reference command analytical expression for the three objectives of current balance, active power constant and reactive power constant. In addition, based on the relative value of each target's volatility, a comprehensive wave function expression is established. By deriving the comprehensive wave function, the corresponding negative sequence current reference value is obtained. Therefore, the VSG can achieve the minimum comprehensive fluctuation under the premise that the three targets meet the requirements of grid connection, and the output power quality is improved. The effectiveness of the proposed control strategy is verified by simulation and experimental results.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Illuminating and Electrical Installation Engineers
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• v.29 no.9
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• pp.33-41
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• 2015

To improve the power quality of distributed generation (DG) systems even in the presence of distorted grid condition, dual current control scheme of a grid-connected inverter is proposed. The proposed current control scheme is achieved by decomposing the inverter state equations into the fundamental and harmonic components. The derived models are employed to design dual current controllers. The conventional PI decoupling current controller is used in the fundamental model to control the main power flow in DG systems. At the same time, the predictive control is applied in the harmonic model to suppress undesired harmonic currents to zero quickly. To decompose the voltage inputs and state variables into the fundamental and harmonic components, the fourth order band pass filter (BPF) is designed in the discrete-time domain for a digital implementation. For experimental verification, 2kVA prototype of a grid-connected inverter has been constructed using digital signal processor (DSP) TMS320F28335. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is demonstrated through comparative simulation and experimental results.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.1672-1682
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• 2017

For grid-connected LCL-filtered inverters, the inverter-side current can be used as the control object with one current sensor for both LCL resonance damping and over-current protection, while the grid-voltage feedforward or harmonic resonant compensator is used for suppressing low-order grid current harmonics. However, it was found that the grid current harmonics were high and often beyond the standard limitations with this control. The limitations of the inverter-side current control in suppressing low-order grid current harmonics are analyzed through inverter output impedance modeling. No matter which compensator is used, the maximum magnitudes of the inverter output impedance at lower frequencies are closely related to the LCL parameters and are decreased by increasing the control delay. Then, to improve the grid current quality without complicating the control or design, this study proposes designing the filter capacitance considering the current harmonic constraint and using a PWM mode with a short control delay. Test results have confirmed the limitation and verified the performance of the improved approaches.

• Journal of international Conference on Electrical Machines and Systems
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.425-433
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• 2012

As the demand for electric power increases rapidly and the amount of fossil fuels decreases year by year, making use of renewable resources seem very necessary. However, due to the discontinuous nature of renewable resources and the hierarchical topology of existing grids, power quality and grid stability will deteriorate as more and more distributed generations (DGs) are connected to the grids. It is a good idea to combine local utilization, local consumption, energy storage and DGs to form a grid-friendly micro grid, these micro grids can then assembled into an intelligent power system - the smart Grid. It can optimize power flow and integrate power generation and consumption effectively. Most importantly, the power quality and grid stability can be improved greatly. This paper depicts how the smart grid addresses the current issues of a power system. It also figures out the key technologies and expectations of the smart grid.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.1348-1357
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• 2015

Under traditional unified power quality conditioner (UPQC) control, a UPQC series converter (SC) is mainly used to handle grid-side power quality problems while its parallel converter (PC) is mainly used to handle load-side power quality problems. The SC and PC are relatively independent. The SC is usually in standby mode and it only runs when the grid voltage abruptly changes. In this paper, novel UPQC coordinated control strategies are proposed which use the SC to share the reactive power compensation function of the PC especially without grid-side power quality problems. However, in some cases, there will be a circulating current between the SC and the PC, which will probably influence the compensation fashion, the compensation capacity, or the normal work of the UPQC. Through an active power circulation analysis, strategies with and without a circulating current are presented which fuses the reactive power allocation strategy of the SC and the PC, the composite control strategy of the SC and the compensation strategy of the DC storage unit. Both of the strategies effectively solve the SC long term idle problem, limit the influence of the circulating current, optimize all of the UPQC units and reduce the production cost. An analysis, along with simulation andexperimental results, is presented to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed control strategies.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.14 no.2
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• pp.383-391
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• 2014

For the digital control of systems such as grid-connected inverters, measuring inverter output currents accurately is essential. However, current measurement offsets are inevitably generated by current measurement paths and cause DC current components in real inverter output currents. Real inverter output currents with DC components cause the DC-link capacitor voltage to oscillate at the frequency of a utility voltage. For these reasons, current measurement offsets deteriorate the overall system performance. A compensation strategy to eliminate the effect of current measurement offsets in grid-connected inverters is proposed in this study. The validity of the proposed compensation strategy is verified through simulations and experiments. Results show that the proposed compensation strategy improves the performance of grid-connected inverters.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.1578-1586
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• 2016

A power quality improvement scheme for grid connected inverters, even in the presence of the disturbances in grid voltages due to harmonic distortions and three-phase imbalance, is presented for distributed generation (DG) power systems. The control objective is to force the inverter currents to follow their references with robustness even under external disturbances in grid voltages. The proposed scheme is realized by a disturbance observer (DOB) based current control scheme. Since the uncertainty in a system can be effectively canceled out using an estimated disturbance by the DOB, the resultant system behaves like a closed-loop system consisting of a disturbance-free nominal model. For experimental verification, a 2 kVA laboratory prototype of a grid connected inverter has been built using a digital signal processor (DSP) TMS320F28335. Through comparative simulations and experimental results under grid disturbances such as harmonic distortion and imbalance, the effectiveness of the proposed DOB based current control scheme is demonstrated.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.654-665
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• 2016

The pumping of electric power from photovoltaic (PV) farms is normally carried out using transformers, which require heavy mounting structures and are thus costly, less efficient, and bulky. Therefore, transformerless schemes are developed for the injection of power into the grid. Compared with the H4 inverter topology, the H6 topology is a better choice for pumping PV power into the grid because of the reduced common mode current. This paper presents how the perturb and observe (P&O) algorithm for maximum power point tracking (MPPT) can be implemented in the H6 inverter topology along with the improved sinusoidal current injected to the grid at unity power factor with the average current mode control technique. On the basis of the P&O MPPT algorithm, a power reference for the present insolation level is first calculated. Maintaining this power reference and referring to the AC sine wave of bus bars, a sinusoidal current at unity power factor is injected to the grid. The proportional integral (PI) controller and fuzzy logic controller (FLC) are designed and implemented. The FLC outperforms the PI controller in terms of conversion efficiency and injected power quality. A simulation in the MATLAB/SIMULINK environment is carried out. An experimental prototype is built to validate the proposed idea. The dynamic and steady-state performances of the FLC controller are found to be better than those of the PI controller. The results are presented in this paper.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.365-376
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• 2009

In this paper, the implementation of a three-phase shunt active power filter is presented. The filter is essentially three independent single-phase current-controlled voltage source inverters (CC-VSI) with a common DC bus. The CC- VSI is operated to directly control the AC grid current to be sinusoidal and in phase with the grid voltage without detecting the load currents. The APF consists of a current control loop, which shapes the grid currents to be sinusoidal and a voltage control loop, which regulates the active power balance of the system. The experimental results indicate that the active filter is able to handle predominantly the harmonics, as well as the unbalance and reactive power, so that the grid currents are sinusoidal, in phase with the grid voltages and symmetrical.