A fault ride-through strategy for grid-forming converters under symmetrical and asymmetrical grid faults

Abstract

In order to maintain grid-forming converter (GFM) voltage source behaviour under current limiting mode, a threshold virtual impedance (TVI) current limiting control is proposed, which is controlled in the positive and negative sequence synchronous reference frames for symmetrical and asymmetrical fault conditions. The converter current is strictly limited within the maximum limit without the need for current saturation limiters. Since the TVI control is based on 3-phase sinusoidal currents, it is shown that using the measured current instead of the existing current reference for the TVI control may cause oscillatory behaviour when a large switching delay is considered. Since sequence extraction control is necessary, the paper also compares GFM dynamic stability under the three well-known sequence extraction methods (i.e. delay cancellation, dual second order generalized integrator, and decoupled double synchronous reference frame). It is shown that the differences are small when GFM is not in current limiting mode, but they are large when GFM is in current limiting mode or switching delays are considered.