Structural Resemblance Between Droop Controllers and Phase-Locked Loops

Abstract

It is well known that droop control is fundamental to the operation of power systems and now the parallel operation of inverters, while phase-locked loops (PLLs) are widely adopted in modern electrical engineering. In this paper, it is shown at first that droop control and PLLs structurally resemble each other. This bridges the gap between the two communities working on droop control and PLLs. As a result, droop controllers and PLLs can be improved and further developed via adopting the advancements in the other field. This finding is then applied to operate the conventional droop controller for inverters with inductive output impedance to achieve the function of PLLs, without having a dedicated synchronization unit. Extensive experimental results are provided to validate the theoretical analysis.

Keywords

• Droop control
• enhanced phase-locked loop (PLL)
• sinusoidal tracking algorithm (STA)
• microgrid
• smart grid integration
• inverters