Energy Shaping Control for Stabilization of Interconnected Voltage Source Converters in Weakly-Connected AC Microgrid Systems

With the ubiquitous installations of renewable energy resources such as solar and wind, for decentralized power applications across the United States, microgrids are being viewed as an avenue for achieving this goal. Various independent system operators and regional transmission operators such as Southwest Power Pool (SPP), Midcontinent System Operator (MISO), PJM Interconnection and Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) manage the transmission and generation systems that host the distributed energy resources (DERs). Voltage source converters typically interconnect the DERs to the utility system and used in High voltage dc (HVDC) systems for transmitting power throughout the United States. A microgrid configuration is built at the 13.8kV 4.75MVA National Center for Reliable Energy Transmission (NCREPT) testing facility for performing grid-connected and islanded operation of interconnected voltage source converters. The interconnected voltage source converters consist of a variable voltage variable frequency (VVVF) drive, which powers a regenerative (REGEN) load bench acting as a distributed energy resource emulator. Due to the weak-grid interface in islanded mode testing, a voltage instability occurs on the VVVF dc link voltage causing the system to collapse. This dissertation presents a new stability theorem for stabilizing interconnected voltage source converters in microgrid systems with weak-grid interfaces. The new stability theorem is derived using the concepts of Dirac composition in Port-Hamiltonian systems, passivity in physical systems, eigenvalue analysis and robust analysis based on the edge theorem for parametric uncertainty. The novel stability theorem aims to prove that all members of the classes of voltage source converter-based microgrid systems can be stabilized using an energy-shaping control methodology. The proposed theorems and stability analysis justifies the development of the Modified Interconnection and Damping Assignment Passivity-Based Control (Modified IDA-PBC) method to be utilized in stabilizing the microgrid configuration at NCREPT for mitigating system instabilities. The system is simulated in MATLAB/SimulinkTM using the Simpower toolbox to observe the system’s performance of the designed controller in comparison to the decoupled proportional intergral controller. The simulation results verify that the Modified-IDA-PBC is a viable option for dc bus voltage control of interconnected voltage source converters in microgrid systems

A Comprehensive Review on Constant Power Loads Compensation Techniques

Microgrid, because of its advantages over conventional utility grids, is a prudent approach to implement renewable resource-based electricity generation. Despite its advantages, microgrid has to operate with a significant proportion of constant power loads that exhibit negative incremental impedance and thus cause serious instability in the system. In this paper, a comprehensive review is presented on accomplished research work on stabilization of dc and ac microgrid. After reviewing these, microgrid system stabilization techniques are classified with required discussions. As found out in this paper, the stabilization techniques can basically be classified as compensation done: 1) at feeder side; 2) by adding intermediate circuitry; and 3) at load side. Finally, after analyzing the merits and drawbacks of each generalized technique, several infographics are presented to highlight the key findings of this paper

Two-leg three-phase inverter control for STATCOM and SSSC applications

Flexible ac transmission systems (FACTS) devices are attracting an increasing interest both in power system academic research and in electric utilities for their capabilities to improve steady-state performance as well as system stability. Several converter topologies for FACTS applications have been proposed in the recent literature, even if those based upon voltage source inverters (VSI) seem to be more attractive due to their intrinsic capability to rapidly respond to network changes such as perturbations subsequent to a fault and their property of being immune to resonance problem. In this paper, a new topology for inverter-based FACTS is proposed. This configuration, employing a two-leg three-phase inverter is employed for both series and parallel-connected reactive power compensators. The converter utilizes a modular topology for allowing a satisfaction of electronic components rating. A control strategy based on variable structure control technique with sliding mode is employed to track appropriate reference quantities. Design and control, as well as good tracking performances, are also verified through numerical simulations

Multifrequency Averaging in Power Electronic Systems

Power electronic systems have been widely used in the electrical power processing for applications with power levels ranging from less than one watt in battery-operated portable devices to more than megawatts in the converters, inverters and rectifiers of the utility power systems. These systems typically involve the passive elements such as inductors, capacitors, and resistors, the switching electronic components such as IGBTs, MOSFETS, and diodes, and other electronic circuits. Multifrequency averaging is one of the widely used modeling and simulation techniques today for the analysis and design of power electronic systems. This technique is capable of providing the average behavior as well as the ripple behavior of power electronic systems. This work begins with the extension of multifrequency averaging to represent uniformly sampled PWM converters. A new multifrequency averaging method of solving an observed issue with model stability is proposed and validated. Multifrequency averaging can also be applied to study the instability phenomenon in power electronic systems. In particular, a reduced-order multifrequency averaging method, along with a genetic algorithm based procedure, is proposed in this work to estimate the regions of attraction of power electronic converters. The performance of this method is shown by comparing the accuracy and efficiency with the existing methods. Finally, a new continuous-time multifrequency averaging method of representing discrete-time systems is proposed. The proposed method is applied to model digitally controlled PWM converters. Simulation and hardware results show that the proposed method is capable of predicting the average behavior as well as the ripple behavior of the closed-loop systems. Future research in the area of multifrequency averaging is proposed

Dual active bridge converters in solid state transformers

This dissertation presents a comprehensive study of Dual Active Bridge (DAB) converters for Solid State Transformers (SSTs). The first contribution is to propose an ac-ac DAB converter as a single stage SST. The proposed converter topology consists of two active H-bridges and one high-frequency transformer. Output voltage can be regulated when input voltage changes by phase shift modulation. Power is transferred from the leading bridge to the lagging bridge. It analyzes the steady-state operation and the range of zero-voltage switching. It develops a switch commutation scheme for the ac-ac DAB converters. Simulation and experiment results of a scaled down prototype are provided to verify the theoretical analysis. The second contribution is to develop a full-order continuous-time average model for dc-dc DAB converters. The transformer current in DAB converter is purely ac, making continuous-time modeling difficult. Instead, the proposed approach uses the dc terms and 1st order terms of transformer current and capacitor voltage as state variables. Singular perturbation analysis is performed to find the sufficient conditions to separate the dynamics of transformer current and capacitor voltage. Experimental results confirm that the proposed model predicts the small-signal frequency response more accurately. The third contribution addresses the controller design of a dc-dc DAB converter when driving a single-phase dc-ac inverter. It studies the effect of 120 Hz current generated by the single-phase inverter. The limitation of PI-controller is investigated. Two methods are proposed to reduce the voltage ripple at the output voltage of DAB converter. The first method helps the feedback loop with feedforward from inverter, while the second one adds an additional resonance controller to the feedback loop. Theoretical analysis, simulation and experiment results are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed methods --Abstract, page iii

Advanced Control of Small-Scale Power Systems with Penetration of Renewable Energy Sources

Stability, protection, and operational restrictions are important factors to be taken into account in a proper integration of distributed energy. The objective of this research is presenting advanced controllers for small-scale power systems with penetration of renewable energy sources resources to ensure stable operation after the network disturbances. Power systems with distributed energy resources are modeled and controlled through applying nonlinear control methods to their power electronic interfaces in this research. The stability and control of both ac and dc systems have been studied in a multi-source framework. The dc distribution system is represented as a class of interconnected, nonlinear discrete-time systems with unknown dynamics. It comprises several dc sources, here called subsystems, along with resistive and constant-power loads (which exhibit negative resistance characteristics and reduce the system stability margins.) Each subsystem includes a dc-dc converter (DDC) and exploits distributed energy resources (DERs) such as photovoltaic, wind, etc. Due to the power system frequent disturbances this system is prone to instability in the presence of the DDC dynamical components and constant-power loads. On the other hand, designing a centralized controller may not be viable due to the distance between the subsystems (dc sources.) In this research it is shown that the stability of an interconnected dc distribution system is enhanced through decentralized discrete-time adaptive nonlinear controller design that employs neural networks (NNs) to mitigate voltage and power oscillations after disturbances have occurred. The ac power system model is comprised of conventional synchronous generators (SGs) and renewable energy sources, here, called renewable generators (RGs,) via grid-tie inverters (GTI.) A novel decentralized adaptive neural network (NN) controller is proposed for the GTI that makes the device behave as a conventional synchronous generator. The advantage of this modeling is that all available damping controllers for synchronous generator, such as AVR (Automatic Voltage Regulator) + PSS (Power System Stabilizer), can be applied to the renewable generator. Simulation results on both types of grids show that the proposed nonlinear controllers are able to mitigate the oscillations in the presence of disturbances and adjust the renewable source power to maintain the grid voltage close to its reference value. The stability of the interconnected grids has been enhanced in comparison to the conventional methods

Double Deadbeat Plus Repetitive Control Scheme for Microgrid System

Parallel connection of converters is a convenient choice when system capacity is to be increased. Parallel-connected voltage source converters, especially neutral point clamped converters, are one of the best choices for its range. However, with the parallel connectivity, the converter possesses a circulating current in its legs, which consequently threatens the safe operation of the system. To alleviate this circulating current problem, in this paper, a double deadbeat (DD) plus repetitive control (RC) scheme is proposed. The RC scheme is employed to mitigate the circulating currents and the DD loop control scheme is employed to achieve a high operating bandwidth for voltage and current characteristics. Furthermore, the DD loop is associated with an adaptive controlling technique, which adjusts internally by itself and provides better performance for nonlinear loads. The proposed DD method forces the equivalent system elements to be placed outside the closed loop, which does not affect the system stability. Initially, the system has been executed with a conventional proportional + integral scheme and then with the proposed DD + RC scheme. The proposed method is verified by implementing a Simulink model in the OPAL-RT platform. Furthermore, the proposed method is built with a prototype, and its results are explored

A Stabilizing, High-Performance Controller for Input Series-Output Parallel Converters

A form of sensorless current mode (SCM) control stabilizes sharing in multiphase input-series-output-parallel (ISOP) dc-dc converter topologies. Previously, ISOP converters have been proposed to reduce the voltage and current ratings of switching devices. Since the inputs are all connected in series, each phase need only be rated for a fraction of the total input voltage. Voltage and current sharing are key - if there is any phase-to-phase imbalance, the system benefits are substantially reduced. In the present work, a simple SCM controller is shown to guarantee stable sharing. Each phase acts independently on the same output reference and desired input voltage. The algorithm and the physics of the circuit lead to balanced input voltages and output currents, even during transients. The ISOP topology is a special case of an interleaved multiphase system. A reduced-order small-signal model is presented. The model is composed of two factors, a single-phase equivalent and a multidelay comb filter. The model fits a measured transfer function well and can be used in feedback design. Experimental results for a five-phase converter demonstrate fast response to a load step, line disturbance rejection, accurate static and dynamic sharing, and high efficiency

Advanced Modeling, Design, and Control of ac-dc Microgrids

An interconnected dc grid that comprises resistive and constant-power loads (CPLs) that is fed by Photovoltaic (PV) units is studied first. All the sources and CPLs are connected to the grid via dc-dc buck converters. Nonlinear behavior of PV units in addition to the effect of the negative-resistance CPLs can destabilize the dc grid. A decentralized nonlinear model and control are proposed where an adaptive output-feedback controller is employed to stabilize the dc grid with assured stability through Lyapunov stability method while each converter employs only local measurements. Adaptive Neural Networks (NNs) are utilized to overcome the unknown dynamics of the dc-dc converters at Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) and CPLs and those of the interconnected network imposed on the converters. Additionally, the use of the output feedback control makes possible the utilization of other measured signals, in case of loss of main signal, at the converter location and creates measurement redundancy that improves reliability of the dc network. The switching between measurement signals of different types are performed through using the NNs without the need to further tuning. Then, in a small-scale ac grid, PV-based Distributed Generation (DG) units, including dc/dc converters and inverters, are controlled such that mimic a synchronous generator behavior. While other control schemes such as Synchronverters are used to control the inverter frequency and power at a fixed dc link voltage, the proposed approach considers both the dc-link voltage and the inverter ac voltage and frequency regulation. The dc-link capacitor stores kinetic energy similar to the rotor of a synchronous generator, providing inertia and contributes to the system stability. Additionally, a reduced Unified Power Flow Controller (UPFC) structure is proposed to enhance transient stability of small-scale micro grids. The reduced UPFC model exploits dc link of the DG unit to generate appropriate series voltage and inject it to the power line to enhance transient stability. It employs optimal control to ensure that the stability of the system is realized through minimum cost for the system. A neural network is used to approximate the cost function based on the weighted residual method

Design and Implementation of Internal Model Based Controllers for DC/ AC Power Converters

The aim of this thesis is to design and implement an advanced control system for a working three-phase DC to AC power converter. Compared to' the traditional PI controller used widely in industry, the new voltage controller can track the reference voltage with improved accuracy and efficiency in the presence of different kind of local loads, and also works well in the single phase voltage control. This voltage controller is combined with a power controller to yield a complete controller. An important aspect of this work is the hardware implementation of the whole system. Main parts ofthis thesis are: ???????? 1. Review ofH-infinity and repetitive control techniques and their applications in power converters. 2. Design of a new voltage controller to eliminate the DC component in the output voltages, and taking into account the practical issues such as the processing delay due to the digital signal processor (DSP) implementation. 3. Modelling and simulation of the converter system incorporating different control techniques and with different kinds of loads. 4. Hardware implementation and the two-processor controller. The parallel communication between the DSPs. 5. The main problems encountered in???????????????????? hardware implementation and programming. The software used to initialize DSPs, implement the discretetime voltage controller and other functions such ~ generations of space vector pulse width modulation (SVPWM) signals, circuit protections, analog to digital (AD) cOl)versions, data transmission, etc. 6. Experimental results the under circumstances of no load connected to the converter, pure three-phase resistive loads, three-phase unbalanced resistive' loads and the series resistor-inductor loads. /Imperial Users onl