Accurate Peer-to-Peer Hierarchical Control Method for Hybrid DC Microgrid Clusters

Abstract

Hybrid DC microgrid clusters contain various types of converters such as BOOST, BUCK, and bidirectional DC/DC converters, making the control strategy complex and difficult to achieve plug-and-play. The common master–slave hierarchical control strategy makes it difficult to achieve accurate and stable system control. This paper proposes an accurate peer-to-peer hierarchical control method for the hybrid DC microgrid cluster, and the working principle of this hierarchical control method is analyzed in detail. The microgrid cluster consists of three sub-microgrids, where sub-microgrid A consists of three BUCK converters, sub-microgrid B consists of three BOOST converters, and sub-microgrid C consists of two bidirectional DC/DC converters. According to all possible operations of various sub-microgrids in the microgrid cluster, the top-, mid-, and bottom-level controls are designed to solve the coordination control problem among different types of sub-microgrids. In this paper, a hybrid microgrid cluster simulation model is built in the PLECS simulation environment, and an experimental hardware platform is designed. The simulation and experiment results verified the accuracy of the proposed control strategy and its fast plug-and-play regulation ability for the system.

Keywords

• DC microgrid
• hierarchical control
• BOOST converter
• BUCK converter
• bidirectional DC/DC converter