Uncertainty and disturbance estimator design to shape and reduce the output impedance of inverter

Power inverters are becoming more and more common in the modern grid. Due to their switching nature, a passive filter is installed at the inverter output. This generates high output impedance which limits the inverter ability to maintain high power quality at the inverter output. This thesis deals with an impedance shaping approach to the design of power inverter control. The Uncertainty and Disturbance Estimator (UDE) is proposed as a candidate for direct formation of the inverter output impedance. The selection of UDE is motivated by the desire for the disturbance rejection control and the tracking controller to be decoupled. It is demonstrated in the thesis that due to this fact the UDE filter design directly influences the inverter output impedance and the reference model determines the inverter internal electromotive force. It was recently shown in the literature and further emphasized in this thesis that the classic low pass frequency design of the UDE cannot estimate periodical disturbances under the constraint of finite control bandwidth. Since for a power inverter both the reference signal and the disturbance signal are of periodical nature, the classic UDE lowpass filter design does not give optimal results. A new design approach is therefore needed. The thesis develops four novel designs of the UDE filter to significantly reduce the inverter output impedance and maintain low Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) of the inverter output voltage. The first design is the based on a frequency selective filter. This filter design shows superiority in both observing and rejecting periodical disturbances over the classic low pass filter design. The second design uses a multi-band stop design to reject periodical disturbances with some uncertainty in the frequency. The third solution uses a classic low pass filter design combined with a time delay to match zero phase estimation of the disturbance at the relevant spectrum. Furthermore, this solution is combined with a resonant tracking controller to reduce the tracking steady-state error in the output voltage. The fourth solution utilizes a low-pass filter combined with multiple delays to increase the frequency robustness. This method shows superior performance over the multi-band-stop and the time delayed filter in steady-state. All the proposed methods are validated through extensive simulation and experimental results

Model-Free Predictive Control of Motor Drives and Power Converters:A Review

Predictive control has emerged as a promising control method in a variety of technological fields. Model predictive control, as one of the subdivisions of this control method, has found a growing number of applications in power electronics and motor drives. In practical implementations, model predictive control faces performance degradation of the controlled plant due to its dependency on a model. There are considerable numbers of review papers that are devoted to the different points of view of predictive control. However, the existing literature lacks a review study that addresses the solutions for parameter dependency of the model predictive control method. Recently, model-free predictive control has been used in drives and power electronics as a solution for dealing with the model-dependency of the model predictive control method. There are many papers that have used such methods. In this paper, a classification is proposed for the different implementation types of model-free predictive control or similar methods that address model parameter uncertainties. Additionally, a comparison between the methods is also presented

New Control Algorithms for the Distributed Generation Interface in Grid-Connected and Micro-grid Systems

Driven by economic, technical, and environmental reasons, the energy sector is moving into an era where large portions of increases in electrical energy demand will be met through widespread installation of distributed resources or what's known as distributed generation (DG). DG units can operate in parallel to the main grid or in a micro-grid mode. The later is formed by a cluster of DG units connected to a distribution network to maintain the reliability of critical loads, mainly when the grid supply is not available. Distributed resources include variable frequency sources, high frequency sources, and direct energy conversion sources producing dc voltages or currents. The majority of distributed resources are interfaced to the utility grid or to the customer load via dc-ac pulse-width-modulated (PWM) voltage source inverter (VSI) systems. However, these interfaces introduce new issues, such as the absence of the physical inertia, wide-band of dynamics, limited overload capability, susceptibility to parameters variation, and switching harmonics generation. In addition, the uncertain and dynamic nature of the distribution network challenges the stability and control effectiveness of a grid-connected inverter-based DG interface. Generally, difficulties appear in the form of grid impedance and interfacing parameter variations, fast and slow grid-voltage disturbances, grid distortion and unbalance, and interactions between the inverter ac-side filter and the grid. On the other hand, a micro-grid system will be dominated by inverter-based DG units. Unlike conventional power system generators, inverter-based DG units have no physical inertia. This fact makes the micro-grid system potentially susceptible to oscillations resulting from system disturbances. Severe and random disturbances might be initiated in a micro-grid system, due to load changes, the power sharing mechanism of the inverters and other generators, and interactions between the DG interface and the network. Motivated by the aforementioned difficulties, this thesis presents new control algorithms for the DG interface that guarantee stable and high power quality injection under the occurrence of network disturbances and uncertainties, in both the grid-connected and micro-grid systems. The control architecture of the proposed DG interface relies on the following subsystems. First, a newly designed deadbeat current regulation scheme is proposed. The proposed design guarantees high power quality current injection under the presence of different disturbing parameters such as grid voltage distortion, interfacing parameter variation, and inverter system delays. Further, it utilizes the maximum dynamic performance of the inverter in a way that provides a high bandwidth and decoupled control performance for the outer control loops. Different topologies of the ac-side filter are considered for the current control design. Second, a novel adaptive discrete-time grid-voltage sensorless interfacing scheme for DG inverters is proposed. The adaptive interface relies on a new interface-monitoring unit that is developed to facilitate accurate and fast estimation of the interfacing impedance parameters and the grid voltage vector (magnitude and position) at the point of common coupling. The estimated grid voltage is utilized to realize a grid-voltage sensorless interfacing scheme, whereas the interfacing parameters are utilized for the self-tuning control and interface-parameter monitoring. Further, a simple and robust synchronization algorithm and a voltage-sensorless average power control loop are proposed to realize an adaptive voltage-sensorless DG interface. The voltage-sensorless interface positively contributes to the elimination of the residual negative sequence and voltage feed-forward compensation errors, and to the robustness of the power sharing mechanism in paralleled inverter systems, where the power-sharing mechanism is generally based on open-loop controllers. Third, a new voltage control scheme for the DG interface featuring fast load voltage regulation and effective mitigation of fast voltage disturbances is proposed. The proposed voltage control scheme targets the problem of fast and large-signal-based voltage disturbances, which is common in typical distribution feeders. A hybrid voltage controller combining a linear with a variable-structure-control element is proposed for the DG interface. Positive and dual-sequence versions of the proposed voltage controller are developed to address the issue of unbalanced voltage disturbances. The proposed voltage controller successfully embeds a wide band of frequency modes through an equivalent internal model. Subsequently, wide range of balanced and unbalanced voltage perturbations, including capacitor-switching disturbances, can be effectively mitigated. Fourth, to constrain the drift of the low frequency modes in a conventional droop-controlled micro-grid, a new transient-based droop controller with adaptive transient-gains is proposed. The proposed power-sharing controller offers an active damping feature that is designed to preserve the dynamic performance and stability of each inverter unit at different loading conditions. Unlike conventional droop controllers, the proposed droop controller yields two-degree of freedom tunable controller. Subsequently, the dynamic performance of the power-sharing mechanism can be adjusted, without affecting the static droop gain, to damp the oscillatory modes of the power-sharing controller. The overall robust DG interface facilitates a robust micro-grid operation and safe plug-and-play integration of DG units on existing distribution systems; hence increasing the system penetration of DG. The direct result of this development is huge financial saving for utilities by capturing the salient features of deploying DG into existing utility networks. Further, these developments are significant to the industry as they provide the blue print for reliable control algorithms in future DG units, which are expected to operate under challenging system conditions

Model predictive current control of switched reluctance motor with inductance auto-calibration

The thesis is composed of three papers, which investigate the application of Model Predictive Controller (MPC) for current control of Switched Reluctance Motor (SRM). Since the conventional hysteresis current control method is not suitable for high power SRM drive system with low inductance and limited switching frequency, MPC is a promising alternative approach for this application. The proposed MPC can cope with the measurement noise as well as uncertainties within the machine inductance profile. In the first paper, a MPC current control method for Double-Stator Switched Reluctance Motor (DSSRM) drives is presented. A direct adaptive estimator is incorporated to follow the inductance variations in a DSSRM. In the second paper, the Linear Quadratic (LQ) form and dynamic programming recursion for MPC are analyzed, afterwards the unconstrained MPC solution for stochastic SRM model is derived. The Kalman filter is employed to reduce the variance of measurement noises. Based on Recursive Linear-Square (RLS) estimation, the inductance profile is calibrated dynamically. In the third paper, a simplified recursive MPC current control algorithm for SRM is applied for embedded implementation. A novel auto-calibration method for inductance surface estimation is developed to improve current control performance of SRM drive in statistic terms. --Abstract, page iv

Prädiktive Regelung und Finite-Set-Beobachter für Windgeneratoren mit variabler Drehgeschwindigkeit

This dissertation presents several model predictive control (MPC) techniques and finite-position-set observers (FPSOs) for permanent-magnet synchronous generators and doubly-fed induction generators in variable-speed wind turbines. The proposed FPSOs are novel ones and based on the concept of finite-control-set MPC. Then, the problems of the MPC techniques like sensitivity to variations of the model parameters and others are investigated and solved in this work.Die vorliegende Dissertation stellt mehrere unterschiedliche Verfahren der modellprädiktiven Regelung (MPC) und so genannte Finite-Position-Set-Beobachter (FPSO) sowohl für Synchrongeneratoren mit Permanentmagneterregung als auch für doppelt gespeiste Asynchrongeneratoren in Windkraftanlagen mit variabler Drehzahl vor und untersucht diese. Für die Beobachter (FPSO) wird ein neuartiger Ansatz vorgestellt, der auf dem Konzept der Finite-Control-Set-MPC basiert. Außerdem werden typische Eigenschaften der MPC wie beispielsweise die Anfälligkeit gegenüber Parameterschwankungen untersucht und kompensiert

Modelling and control of power inverters in microgrids

Power electronic converter systems play an important role in the interconnection of renewable energy sources in microgrids and utility grid. The interface between energy sources and microgrids is usually implemented by digitally controlled power inverters. This thesis provides a discrete modelling and design method for the digitally controlled inverters in microgrids. The fundamentals and background of digital control of power inverters are introduced. The small-signal models for digital pulse-width-modulations (PWMs) with delay effects are derived. Based on the models, the controllers can be designed using several methods according to the block diagrams. The simulation software and experimental environment for the digitally controlled inverters are described. For inverters operating in parallel, a linear voltage control scheme with duty-ratio feedforward is proposed. The control parameters are chosen according to the stable operating condition derived in z-domain. The closed-loop transfer function and output impedance for both the classical controller and the proposed controller are derived theoretically. A comparison reveals the advantages of the proposed control scheme: a unity closed-loop gain, no phase shift, good current sharing and low total harmonic distortion (THD) of the output voltage. The theoretical results are verified by the experimental setup of a system with two digitally controlled inverters connected in parallel. For digitally controlled grid-connected inverters with LCL filters, new small-signal z-domain models are deduced. The proposed methods model the inverters including different delay effects under most possible circumstances, which allows a direct design for controllers in z-domain. The stability boundaries obtained from the root loci of the classic models and the proposed models are compared to the simulation results, showing that the proposed z-domain models are more accurate in predicting instabilities. Experimental results are presented, showing the proposed models are also capable of predicting the values of control variables at the true sampling instants. The phase-shifted modulated multisampled multilevel inverter is studied. The filter current ripple frequency of the multilevel inverters is increased by the phase-shifted PWM. The small-signal z-domain model is derived. Compared to the bipolar switched inverter, the multisampled multilevel inverter is characterized by the capability of achieving higher feedback control gains, which improves the control performance. An experimental prototype based on a 10 kHz switching frequency, 80 kHz sampling frequency five-level single-phase H bridge inverter is tested to demonstrate the validity of the analysis