Distributed Control of Islanded Meshed Microgrids

Abstract

The main objective in microgrids is keeping their frequency and voltage close to the rated values, and ensuring a precise power sharing of their distributed generators (DGs). This can be challenging in a meshed microgrid due to the tight coupling between active and reactive power resulting from its various power line impedances. Centralized control strategies are widely used to address these issues. But, the increase in DGs number in meshed microgrids rises the communication system cost due to the high number of data to be acquired and processed. Most of existing distributed control strategies in literature are unable to treat simultaneously power sharing as well as voltage and frequency restoration. In this paper a distributed consensus-based control is proposed for accurate active and reactive power sharing as well as frequency and voltage restoration in meshed reconfigurable islanded microgrids. The controllers for primary and secondary control are locally adjusted and do not require knowledge of the microgrid structure. The efficiency of the proposed strategies is verified with large load variations, microgrid topology change and various communication delays by simulation and validated by real-time Hardware in The Loop tests.

Keywords

• Distributed generators
• distributed control
• frequency regulation
• power sharing
• secondary control
• smartgrids