• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.16 no.1
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• pp.329-339
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• 2016

Owing to mismatched feeder impedances in an islanded microgrid, the conventional droop control method typically results in errors in reactive power sharing among distributed generation (DG) units. In this study, an improved droop control strategy based on secondary voltage control is proposed to enhance the reactive power sharing accuracy in an islanded microgrid. In a DG local controller, an integral term is introduced into the voltage droop function, in which the voltage compensation signal from the secondary voltage control is utilized as the common reactive power reference for each DG unit. Therefore, accurate reactive power sharing can be realized without any power information exchange among DG units or between DG units and the central controller. Meanwhile, the voltage deviation in the microgrid common bus is removed. Communication in the proposed strategy is simple to implement because the information of the voltage compensation signal is broadcasted from the central controller to each DG unit. The reactive power sharing accuracy is also not sensitive to time-delay mismatch in the communication channels. Simulation and experimental results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.282-293
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• 2017

There exists a strong coupling between real and reactive power owing to the complex impedances in droop based islanded microgrids (MGs). The existing virtual impedance methods consider improvements of the impedance matching for sharing of the voltage controlled power (VCP) (reactive power for Q-V droop, and real power for P-V droop), which yields a 1-DOF (degree of freedom) tunable virtual impedance. However, a weak impedance matching for sharing of the frequency controlled power (FCP) (real power for $P-{\omega}$ droop, and reactive power for $Q-{\omega}$ droop) may result in FCP overshoots and even oscillations during load transients. This in turn results in VCP oscillations due to the strong coupling. In this paper, a 2-DOF tunable adaptive virtual impedance method considering impedance matching for both real and reactive power (IM-PQ) is proposed to improve the power sharing performance of MGs. The dynamic response is promoted by suppressing the coupled power oscillations and power overshoots while realizing accurate power sharing. In addition, the proposed power sharing controller has a better parametric adaptability. The stability and dynamic performances are analyzed with a small-signal state-space model. Simulation and experimental results are presented to investigate the validity of the proposed scheme.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.19 no.4
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• pp.1020-1033
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• 2019

This paper presents a control strategy to enhance the accuracy of reactive power sharing between paralleled three-phase inverters in an islanded microgrid. In this study, the mismatch of power sharing when the line impedances have significant differences between inverters connected to a microgrid has been solved, the accuracy of the reactive power sharing in an islanded microgrid is increased, the voltage droop slope is tuned to compensate for the mismatch of voltage drops across the line impedances by using an enhanced droop controller. The proposed method ensures accurate power sharing even if the microgrid has local loads at the output of the inverters. The control model has been simulated by MATLAB/Simulink with two or three inverters connected in parallel. Simulation results demonstrate the accuracy of the implemented control method. Furthermore, in order to validate the theoretical analysis and simulation results, an experimental setup was built in the laboratory. Results obtained from the experimental setup verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.19 no.6
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• pp.1575-1581
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• 2019

Due to the mismatched line impedance among distributed generation units (DGs) and uncontrolled harmonic current, the droop controller has a number of problems such as inaccurate reactive power sharing and voltage distortion at the point of common coupling (PCC). To solve these problems, this paper proposes a resistive-capacitive virtual impedance control method. The proposed control method modifies the DG output impedance at the fundamental and harmonic frequencies to compensate the mismatched line impedance among DGs and to regulate the harmonic current. Finally, reactive power sharing is accurately achieved, and the PCC voltage distortion is compensated. In addition, adaptively controlling the virtual impedance guarantees compensation performance in spite of load changes. The effectiveness of the proposed control method was verified by experimental results.

• Proceedings of the KIPE Conference
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• 2016.07a
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• pp.95-96
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• 2016

This paper presents a voltage and frequency droop control for accurate power sharing of parallel distributed generation (DG) inverters in low voltage microgrid. In practice, line impedances between inverters and the point of common coupling of a microgrid are not always equal. This inequality in line impedances often results in reactive power sharing mismatch among inverters. To address this problem, intensive researches have been conducting. Although these methods can solve the unbalanced reactive power sharing, there are still problems remain unresolved, such as complicated structure or circulating current. To overcome such problems, a new droop control scheme is proposed, which not only guarantees accurate reactive power sharing but also has simple structure so that it can be easily implemented in existing systems without any hardware modification. The simulation is performed using Matlab/Simulinks to validate the proposed scheme.

• Proceedings of the KIPE Conference
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• 2018.07a
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• pp.138-140
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• 2018

Parallel distributed generators (DGs) in the islanded microgrid are generally operated autonomously by means of the droop control scheme. However, the traditional droop control methods which use the P-${\omega}$ and Q-E curve to share power between DGs are still concerned to improve the accuracy of reactive power sharing. Moreover, the uncontrolled harmonic power reduces the point of common coupling (PCC) voltage quality and microgrid stability. In order to solve these problems, this paper proposes an enhanced PCC harmonic control strategy and an improved reactive power sharing control scheme. Based on the low bandwidth communications, a secondary control is implemented with both central controller and local controller. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is analyzed through the simulation.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.18 no.6
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• pp.1751-1759
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• 2018

This paper presents parallel-connected inverters to achieve accurate proportional power sharing. Due to line impedance mismatch, reactive power cannot be distributed proportionally when using the conventional $P-{\omega}$ and $\mathcal{Q}-E$ droop. In order to realize reactive proportional power sharing, the ratio of the droop coefficients should be inversely proportional to their power-sharing ratios. Meanwhile, the ratio of the line impedance should be inversely proportional to the desired power-sharing ratio, which is very difficult to be met in practice. In order to deal with this issue, a practical control strategy is presented. By measuring the PCC voltage and using the virtual impedance, the output impedance of individual inverters is reconstructed to counteract the line impedance effect. In order to guarantee system stability, a low pass filter is designed to suppress the bandwidth of the line compensation. Finally, the simulation and experimental results are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.

• Proceedings of the KIPE Conference
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• 2016.11a
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• pp.47-48
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• 2016

Parallel distributed generators (DGs) in the islanded micro-grid are normally controlled with the aid of the droop control scheme. However, the traditional droop control methods which use the P-${\omega}$ and Q-E curve to share power between DGs are still concerned to improve the accurate of reactive power sharing and variation of frequency and voltage at the point of common coupling (PCC). This paper proposes a control scheme to solve the limitation of microgrid in islanded operation such as reactive power sharing accuracy and PCC voltage and frequency restoring. In order to achieve the control objective, a secondary control is implemented with both central controller and local controller by using the low bandwidth communications. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is analyzed through the simulation.

• Proceedings of the KIPE Conference
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• 2017.07a
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• pp.120-121
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• 2017

This paper proposes an enhanced distributed generation (DG) unit with an adaptive virtual impedance control approach in order to address the inaccurate reactive power sharing problem. The proposed method can adaptively regulate the DG virtual impedance, and the effect of the mismatch in feeder impedances is compensated to share the reactive power accurately. The proposed control strategy is fully distributed and the need for the microgrid central controller is eliminated. Furthermore, the proposed method can be directly implemented without requirement of pre-knowledge of the feeder impedances. Simulations are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control approach.

• Journal of Power Electronics
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• v.16 no.3
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• pp.1152-1162
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• 2016

The unequal impedances of the interconnecting cables between paralleled inverters in the island mode of microgrids cause inaccurate reactive power sharing when the traditional droop control is used. Many studies in the literature adopt low speed communications between the inverters and the central control unit to overcome this problem. However, the losses of this communication link can be very detrimental to the performance of the controller. This paper proposes an improved reactive power-sharing control method. It employs infrequent measurements of the voltage at the point of common coupling (PCC) to estimate the output impedance between the inverters and the PCC and then readjust the voltage droop controller gains accordingly. The controller then reverts to being a traditional droop controller using the newly calculated gains. This increases the immunity of the controller against any losses in the communication links between the central control unit and the inverters. The capability of the proposed control method has been demonstrated by simulation and experimental results using a laboratory scale microgrid.