Constant Power Load Stabilization in DC Microgrid Systems Using Passivity-Based Control With Nonlinear Disturbance Observer

Abstract

This paper aims to present a robust passivity-based control (PBC) strategy to solve the instability problem caused by the constant power loads (CPLs) in dc microgrid systems. This strategy is designed to stabilize and regulate the dc-bus voltage of the dc microgrid and to eliminate the dc-bus voltage deviations caused by the system disturbances such as load and input voltage variations. To this end, the control robustness of the PBC strategy is improved by adding the nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO). Whereas, the PBC is applied to damp the system oscillation caused by the CPLs and to ensure that each parallel subsystem in dc microgrid is passive (stable). Based on estimation technique, the NDO works in parallel with the PBC strategy to compensate the system disturbances through a feed-forward compensation channels. Furthermore, the PBC strategy provides self-(I-V) droop characteristics, which able to eliminate the voltage mismatch between the parallel converters and obtain equal current sharing between them. This control strategy ensures large-signal stability, globally asymptotically stabilization and reacts extremely fast against system disturbances as compared with other PBC strategies. The MATLAB simulation and hardware-in-loop (HIL) experimental results are presented to verify the control robustness of the proposed controller.

Keywords

• Constant power load (CPL)
• dc microgrid
• dc-dc power converter
• passivity-based control (PBC)
• nonlinear disturbance observer (NDO)
• hardware-in-loop (HIL)