Effect of State Feedback Coupling on the Design of Voltage Source Inverters for Standalone Applications

This Ph.D. thesis aims at investigating the effect of state feedback cross‐coupling decoupling of the capacitor voltage on the dynamics performance of Voltage Source Inverters for standalone microgrids/Uninterruptible Power Supply systems. Computation and PWM delays are the main factors which limit the achievable bandwidth of current regulators in digital implementations. In particular, the performance of state feedback decoupling is degraded because of these delays. Two decoupling techniques aimed at improving the transient response of voltage and current regulators are investigated, named nonideal and ideal capacitor voltage decoupling respectively. In particular, the latter solution consists in leading the capacitor voltage on the state feedback decoupling path in order to compensate for system delays. Practical implementation issues are discussed with reference to both the decoupling techniques. Moreover, different resonant regulators structures for the inner current loop are analysed and compared to investigate which is the most suitable for standalone microgrid applications. A design methodology for the voltage loop, which considers the closed loop transfer functions developed for the inner current loop, is also provided. Proportional resonant voltage controllers tuned at specific harmonic frequencies are designed according to the Nyquist criterion taking into account application requirements. For this purpose, a mathematical expression based on root locus analysis is proposed to find the minimum value of the resonant gain at the fundamental frequency. The exact model of the output LC filter of a three‐phase inverter is derived in the z‐domain. The devised formulation allows the comparison of two techniques based on a lead compensator and Smith predictor structure. These solutions permit the bandwidth of the current regulator to be widened while still achieving good dynamic performance. As a consequence, the voltage regulator can be designed for a wide bandwidth and even mitigates odd harmonics arising with unbalance loads supply. Discrete‐time domain implementation issues of an anti‐wind up scheme are discussed as well, highlighting the limitations of some discretization methods. Experimental tests performed in accordance to Uninterruptible Power Supply standards verify the theoretical analysis

New hybrid active power filter for harmonic current suppression and reactive power compensation

In the case of undistorted and balanced grid voltages, low ratio shunt Active Power Filters (APFs) can give unity power factors and achieve current harmonic cancellation. However, this is not possible when source voltages are distorted and unbalanced. In this study, the cost-effective hybrid active power filter (HAPF) topology for satisfying the requirements of harmonic-current suppression and non-active power compensation for industry is presented. An effective strategy is developed to observe the effect of the placement of power capacitors and LC filters with the shunt active power filter. A new method for alleviating the negative effects of a non-ideal grid voltage is proposed that uses a self-tuning filter algorithm with instantaneous reactive power theory. The real-time control of the studied system was achieved with a field programmable gate array (FPGA) architecture, which was developed using the OPAL-RT system. The performance results of the proposed HAPF system is tested and presented under non-ideal supply voltage conditions

Single-phase power line conditioning with unity power factor under distorted utility voltage

The paper proposes a control method of a single-phase active power line conditioner (APLC) aimed at correcting the power factor of linear and non-linear loads supplied by distorted voltage utility. The method, that is based on the single-phase p-q theory and utilizes a third-order sinusoidal signal integrator, gets utility unity power factor and, at the same time, overcomes the shortcomings of the solutions pursuing utility sinusoidal current, namely the possible onset of un-damped resonance phenomena and the reduction in the energy delivery capabilities; moreover, the method makes the power factor correction robust against the supply distortion. The excellent performance of the method is substantiated by testing it by means of a hardware-in-the-loop setup

Control Design of a Single-Phase DC/AC Inverter for PV Applications

This thesis presents controller designs of a 2 kVA single-phase inverter for photovoltaic (PV) applications. The demand for better controller designs is constantly rising as the renewable energy market continues to rapidly grow. Some background research has been done on solar energy, PV inverter configurations, inverter control design, and hardware component selection. Controllers are designed both for stand-alone and grid-connected modes of operation. For stand-alone inverter control, the outer control loop regulates the filter capacitor voltage. Combining the synchronous frame outer control loop with the capacitor current feedback inner control loop, the system can achieve both zero steady-state error and better step load performance. For grid-tied inverter control, proportional capacitor current feedback is used. This achieves the active damping needed to suppress the LCL filter resonance problem. The outer loop regulates the inverter output current flowing into the grid with a proportional resonant controller and harmonic compensators. With a revised grid synchronization unit, the active power and reactive power can be decoupled and controlled separately through a serial communication based user interface. To validate the designed controllers, a scaled down prototype is constructed and tested with a digital signal processor (DSP) TMS320F28335

Particle Swarm Optimization Trained Artificial Neural Network to Control Shunt Active Power Filter Based on Multilevel Flying Capacitor Inverter

© 2020 by the authors; licensee IIETA, Edmonton, Canada. This article is an open-access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).Shunt Active Power Filters (SAPF) are an emerging power electronics-based technology to mitigate harmonic and improve power quality in distribution grids. The SAPF proposed in this paper is based on three-phase Flying Capacitor Inverter (FCI) with a three-cell per phase topology, which has the advantage to provide voltage stress distribution on the switches. However, controlling the voltage of floating capacitors is a challenging problem for this type of topology. In this paper, a controller based artificial neural networks optimized with particle swarm optimization (ANN-PSO) is proposed to regulate the filter currents to follow the references extracted by the method of synchronous reference frame (SRF). The simulation results showed an enhancement of the power quality with a significant reduction in the THD levels of the current source under various loading conditions, which confirms the effectiveness, and robustness of the proposed control scheme and SAPF topology.Peer reviewe

Grid-Following Voltage Source Converters: Basic Schemes and Current Control Techniques to Operate with Unbalanced Voltage Conditions

The growing relevance of voltage source converters (VSCs), and the deep impact they have on the development and maintenance of the electrical grid, increase the necessity of further research on how to deal with nonideal grid conditions from the VSCs control. This paper is aimed to summarize the basic techniques and schemes that might be required for a grid-connected VSC to work under these conditions: grid synchronization schemes, sequence decomposition, current reference generation, and current controllers. At the same time, some alternative schemes that improves the basic ones are cited. Modelling and the two typical current controllers design and tuning under stationary and synchronous reference frames are also exhibited. Given the importance of the current control stage in the VSC behaviour, five control schemes, designed to track negative sequence currents, are shown and tested in simulation and experiments. According to the experiments, it is shown that the standard proportional-resonant controller achieves the best performance in negative sequence tracking due to the robustness of its non-ideal version, the improved implementation thanks to the delta operator, and the non-dependence on grid-synchronization schemes. Alternatively, one approach based on dual synchronous reference frame is also highlighted for easiness of implementation and good performance

Crosstalk Reduction in Hybrid Quantum-Classical Networks

In this paper, we propose and investigate several crosstalk reduction techniques for hybrid quantum-classical dense-wavelength-division-multiplexing systems. The transmission of intense classical signals alongside weak quantum ones on the same fiber introduces some crosstalk noise, mainly due to Raman scattering and nonideal channel isolation, that may severely affect the performance of quantum key distribution systems. We examine the conventional methods of suppressing this crosstalk noise, and enhance them by proposing an appropriate channel allocation method that reduces the background crosstalk effectively. Another approach proposed in this paper is the usage of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing, which offers efficient spectral and temporal filtering features

Passivation of Grid-Following VSCs: A Comparison Between Active Damping and Multi-Sampled PWM

This article compares different strategies used to enhance the stability properties of grid-following voltage-source converters (VSCs). Because of digital delays, VSC admittance exhibits a nonpassive zone, which introduces negative damping and may destabilize the grid-connected operation. It is shown that typically used active damping (AD) strategies only bring positive impact up to a certain frequency, while deteriorating admittance properties around and above the Nyquist frequency. Multi-sampled pulsewidth modulation (MS-PWM) greatly extends the passive admittance region, using only a single-loop current controller. Experimental admittance measurements are performed on a single-phase VSC, up to twice the switching frequency. Subsequently, different grid-connected scenarios are tested to show that MS-PWM retains stable operation, where AD methods cause instability. This article also offers analytic modeling and experimental measurements of noise propagation for compared strategies. It is shown that derivative-based AD is not highly sensitive; however, MS-PWM offers additional noise suppression