TOWARDS OPTIMAL OPERATION AND CONTROL OF EMERGING ELECTRIC DISTRIBUTION NETWORKS

The growing integration of power-electronics converters enabled components causes low inertia in the evolving electric distribution networks, which also suffer from uncertainties due to renewable energy sources, electric demands, and anomalies caused by physical or cyber attacks, etc. These issues are addressed in this dissertation. First, a virtual synchronous generator (VSG) solution is provided for solar photovoltaics (PVs) to address the issues of low inertia and system uncertainties. Furthermore, for a campus AC microgrid, coordinated control of the PV-VSG and a combined heat and power (CHP) unit is proposed and validated. Second, for islanded AC microgrids composed of SGs and PVs, an improved three-layer predictive hierarchical power management framework is presented to provide economic operation and cyber-physical security while reducing uncertainties. This scheme providessuperior frequency regulation capability and maintains low system operating costs. Third, a decentralized strategy for coordinating adaptive controls of PVs and battery energy storage systems (BESSs) in islanded DC nanogrids is presented. Finally, for transient stability evaluation (TSE) of emerging electric distribution networks dominated by EV supercharging stations, a data-driven region of attraction (ROA) estimation approach is presented. The proposed data-driven method is more computationally efficient than traditional model-based methods, and it also allows for real-time ROA estimation for emerging electric distribution networks with complex dynamics

System identification and adaptive current balancing ON/OFF control of DC-DC switch mode power converter

PhD ThesisReliability becomes more and more important in industrial application of Switch Mode Power Converters (SMPCs). A poorly performing power supply in a power system can influence its operation and potentially compromise the entire system performance in terms of efficiency. To maintain a high reliability, high performance SMPC effective control is necessary for regulating the output of the SMPC system. However, an uncertainty is a key factor in SMPC operation. For example, parameter variations can be caused by environmental effects such as temperature, pressure and humidity. Usually, fixed controllers cannot respond optimally and generate an effective signal to compensate the output error caused by time varying parameter changes. Therefore, the stability is potentially compromised in this case. To resolve this problem, increasing interest has been shown in employing online system identification techniques to estimate the parameter values in real time. Moreover, the control scheme applied after system identification is often called “adaptive control” due to the control signal selfadapting to the parameter variation by receiving the information from the system identification process. In system identification, the Recursive Least Square (RLS) algorithm has been widely used because it is well understood and easy to implement. However, despite the popularity of RLS, the high computational cost and slow convergence speed are the main restrictions for use in SMPC applications. For this reason, this research presents an alternative algorithm to RLS; Fast Affline Projection (FAP). Detailed mathematical analysis proves the superior computational efficiency of this algorithm. Moreover, simulation and experiment result verify this unique adaptive algorithm has improved performance in terms of computational cost and convergence speed compared with the conventional RLS methods. Finally, a novel adaptive control scheme is designed for optimal control of a DC-DC buck converter during transient periods. By applying the proposed adaptive algorithm, the control signal can be successfully employed to change the ON/OFF state of the power transistor in the DC-DC buck converter to improve the dynamic behaviour. Simulation and experiment result show the proposed adaptive control scheme significantly improves the transient response of the buck converter, particularly during an abrupt load change conditio

Grid-Connected Renewable Energy Sources

The use of renewable energy sources (RESs) is a need of global society. This editorial, and its associated Special Issue “Grid-Connected Renewable Energy Sources”, offers a compilation of some of the recent advances in the analysis of current power systems that are composed after the high penetration of distributed generation (DG) with different RESs. The focus is on both new control configurations and on novel methodologies for the optimal placement and sizing of DG. The eleven accepted papers certainly provide a good contribution to control deployments and methodologies for the allocation and sizing of DG

Advanced Mathematics and Computational Applications in Control Systems Engineering

Control system engineering is a multidisciplinary discipline that applies automatic control theory to design systems with desired behaviors in control environments. Automatic control theory has played a vital role in the advancement of engineering and science. It has become an essential and integral part of modern industrial and manufacturing processes. Today, the requirements for control precision have increased, and real systems have become more complex. In control engineering and all other engineering disciplines, the impact of advanced mathematical and computational methods is rapidly increasing. Advanced mathematical methods are needed because real-world control systems need to comply with several conditions related to product quality and safety constraints that have to be taken into account in the problem formulation. Conversely, the increment in mathematical complexity has an impact on the computational aspects related to numerical simulation and practical implementation of the algorithms, where a balance must also be maintained between implementation costs and the performance of the control system. This book is a comprehensive set of articles reflecting recent advances in developing and applying advanced mathematics and computational applications in control system engineering

Recent Advances in Robust Control

Robust control has been a topic of active research in the last three decades culminating in H_2/H_\infty and \mu design methods followed by research on parametric robustness, initially motivated by Kharitonov's theorem, the extension to non-linear time delay systems, and other more recent methods. The two volumes of Recent Advances in Robust Control give a selective overview of recent theoretical developments and present selected application examples. The volumes comprise 39 contributions covering various theoretical aspects as well as different application areas. The first volume covers selected problems in the theory of robust control and its application to robotic and electromechanical systems. The second volume is dedicated to special topics in robust control and problem specific solutions. Recent Advances in Robust Control will be a valuable reference for those interested in the recent theoretical advances and for researchers working in the broad field of robotics and mechatronics

Industrial and Technological Applications of Power Electronics Systems

The Special Issue "Industrial and Technological Applications of Power Electronics Systems" focuses on: - new strategies of control for electric machines, including sensorless control and fault diagnosis; - existing and emerging industrial applications of GaN and SiC-based converters; - modern methods for electromagnetic compatibility. The book covers topics such as control systems, fault diagnosis, converters, inverters, and electromagnetic interference in power electronics systems. The Special Issue includes 19 scientific papers by industry experts and worldwide professors in the area of electrical engineering

TS fuzzy approach for modeling, analysis and design of non-smooth dynamical systems

There has been growing interest in the past two decades in studying the physical model of dynamical systems that can be described by nonlinear, non-smooth differential equations, i.e. non-smooth dynamical systems. These systems exhibit more colourful and complex dynamics compared to their smooth counterparts; however, their qualitative analysis and design are not yet fully developed and still open to exploration. At the same time, Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy systems have been shown to have a great ability to represent a large class of nonlinear systems and approximate their inherent uncertainties. This thesis explores an area of TS fuzzy systems that have not been considered before; that is, modelling, stability analysis and design for non-smooth dynamical systems. TS fuzzy model structures capable of representing or approximating the essential dis- continuous dynamics of non-smooth systems are proposed in this thesis. It is shown that by incorporating discrete event systems, the proposed structure for TS fuzzy models, which we will call non-smooth TS fuzzy models, can accurately represent the smooth (or contin- uous) as well as non-smooth (or discontinuous) dynamics of different classes of electrical and mechanical non-smooth systems including (sliding and non-sliding) Filippov's systems and impacting systems. The different properties of the TS fuzzy modelling (or formalism) are discussed. It is highlighted that the TS fuzzy formalism, taking advantage of its simple structure, does not need a special platform for its implementation. Stability in its new notion of structural stability (stability of a periodic solution) is one of the most important issues in the qualitative analysis of non-smooth systems. An important part of this thesis is focused on addressing stability issues by extending non- smooth Lyapunov theory for verifying the stability of local orbits, which the non-smooth TS fuzzy models can contain. Stability conditions are proposed for Filippov-type and impacting systems and it is shown that by formulating the conditions as Linear Matrix inequalities (LMIs), the onset of non-smooth bifurcations or chaotic phenomena can be detected by solving a feasibility problem. A number of examples are given to validate the proposed approach. Stability robustness of non-smooth TS fuzzy systems in the presence of model uncertainties is discussed in terms of non-smoothness rather than traditional observer design. The LMI stabilization problem is employed as a building block for devising design strategies to suppress the unwanted chaotic behaviour in non-smooth TS fuzzy models. There have been a large number of control applications in which the overall closed-loop sys tem can be stabilized by switching between pre-designed sub-controllers. Inspired by this idea, the design part of this thesis concentrates on fuzzy-chaos control strategies for Filippov-type systems. These strategies approach the design problem by switching be- tween local state-feedback controllers such that the closed-loop TS fuzzy system of interest rapidly converges to the stable periodic solution of the system. All control strategies are also automated as a design problem recast on linear matrix inequality conditions to be solved by modern optimization techniques. Keywords: Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy systems, non-smooth Lyapunov theory, non-smooth dy- namical systems, piecewise-smooth dynamical systems, structural stability, discontinuity- induced bifurcation, chaos controllers, dc-dc converters, Filippov's system, impacting system, linear matrix inequalities.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Optimal energy management and control of microgrids in modern electrical power systems

Microgrids (MGs) are becoming more popular in modern electric power systems owing to their reliability, efficiency, and simplicity. The proportional-integral (PI) based droop control mechanism has been widely used in the MG control domain as the setpoint generator for the primary controller which has several drawbacks. In order to mitigate these issues, and to enhance the transient and steady-state operations in islanded MGs, advanced control and intelligent optimization methodologies are presented in this dissertation. First, to improve the existing PI-based droop relationship in DCMGs, a multi-objective optimization (MOO) based optimal droop coefficient computation method is proposed. Considering the system voltage regulation, system total loss minimization, and enhanced current sharing among the distributed generators (DGs), the Pareto optimal front is obtained using the Elitist non dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA II). Then, a fuzzy membership function approach is introduced to extract the best compromise solution from the Pareto optimal front. The drawbacks of PI-based droop control cannot be entirely mitigated by tuning the droop gains. Hence, a droop free, approximate optimal feedback control strategy is proposed to optimally control DGs in islanded DCMGs. Further, to gain the fully optimal behavior, and to mitigate constant power load (CPL) instabilities, a decentralized optimal feedback control strategy is also introduced for the active loads (ALs) in the MG. In both algorithms, the approximate dynamic programming (ADP) method is employed to solve the constrained input infinite horizon optimal control problem by successive approximation of the value function via a linear in the parameter (LIP) neural network (NN). The NN weights are updated online by a concurrent reinforcement learning (RL) based tuning algorithm, and the convergence of the unknown weights to a neighborhood of the optimal weights is guaranteed without the persistence of excitation (PE). Finally, a local optimal control strategy is presented to path optimization of islanded ACMGs to enhance the transient operations while mitigating the voltage and frequency deviations caused by the traditional droop control. Optimal state and control transient trajectories in the d-q reference frame are obtained by Pontryagin's minimum principle which drives each DG from a given initial condition to their steady-state manifold. Both simulation and experimental results are presented to validate the concepts