Skip to main content
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Charge-Based Droop Control Addressing Control Saturation for Low-Inertia Converters

Conference · · IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (ECCE)
 [1];  [2];  [3];  [3]
  1. Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States); Georgia Institute of Technology
  2. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)
  3. Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)

With bulky dc-link capacitors/inductors, traditional voltage-source converters (VSCs) and current-source converters (CSCs) feature a large inertia to facilitate the converter control under large transients. To achieve high power density with reduced cost, low-inertia converters (LICs) featuring significantly reduced dc-link capacitors/inductors have attracted growing attention. However, without bulky dc-link energy buffer, LICs are prone to control saturation under large transients, resulting in undesired oscillation and instability. This issue cannot be managed by traditional proportional-integral based control due to the low inertia. And it will deteriorate when several LICs are connected in series. To address this challenge in LICs, a model-predictive control (MPC) with a computation-inexpensive feed-forward compensation method has been proposed to provide fast dynamic responses. But it would suffer control saturation under larger transients that degrades the control performance. In this article, a charge-based droop control (CDC) is proposed to address this remaining challenge. This paper firstly analyzes the control saturation challenge in LICs by using a tri-port soft-switching solid-state transformer as an example. Next, the operating principle of the proposed CDC are introduced. Two different implementation approaches are discussed in detail. Lastly, the proposed scheme is validated in simulation with a high-fidelity model of hardware prototype. As a result, the proposed CDC eliminated the 2 kHz oscillation and reduced the dc-link ripple and overshoot due to control saturation by 75% and 50%, respectively.

Research Organization:
Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Renewable Power Office. Solar Energy Technologies Office
DOE Contract Number:
EE0008351
OSTI ID:
1923362
Journal Information:
IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (ECCE), Journal Name: IEEE Energy Conversion Congress and Exposition (ECCE); ISSN 2329-3721; ISSN 2329-3748
Publisher:
IEEE
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (13)

A Tri-Port Current-Source Soft-Switching Medium-Voltage String Inverter for Large-Scale Solar-Plus-Storage Farms journal November 2022
Current-Source Inverter Integrated Motor Drives Using Dual-Gate Four-Quadrant Wide-Bandgap Power Switches journal September 2021
Soft-Switching Current-Source Rectifier Based Onboard Charging System for Electric Vehicles journal September 2021
Soft-Switching Solid-State Transformer (S4T) journal April 2018
Stacked Low-Inertia Converter or Solid-State Transformer: Modeling and Model Predictive Priority-Shifting Control for Voltage Balance journal August 2021
A Reduced-Switch-Count Family of Soft-Switched High-Frequency Inductive AC-Link Converters journal August 2020
Three-Phase Two-Third-PWM Buck-Boost Current Source Inverter System Employing Dual-Gate Monolithic Bidirectional GaN e-FETs journal December 2019
Soft-switching – The Key to High Power WBG Converters conference May 2018
The Case for Soft Switching in Four-Quadrant Power Converters journal December 2021
SiC-Based 5-kV Universal Modular Soft-Switching Solid-State Transformer (M-S4T) for Medium-Voltage DC Microgrids and Distribution Grids journal October 2021
Comparative Investigation of System-Level Optimized Power Conversion System Architectures to Reduce LCOE for Large-Scale PV-Plus-Storage Farms conference October 2021
Predictive Control in Power Electronics and Drives journal December 2008
Feed-Forward Compensation for Model Predictive Control in Tri-port Current-Source Medium-Voltage String Inverters for PV-Plus-Storage Farms conference October 2021