A new decentralized voltage control scheme of an autonomous microgrid under unbalanced and nonlinear load conditions

Abstract

This paper presents an effective voltage control strategy for the autonomous operation of a medium voltage (MV) microgrid under nonlinear and unbalanced load conditions. The main objectives of this strategy are to effectively compensate the harmonic and negative-sequence currents of nonlinear and unbalanced loads using distributed generation (DG) units. The proposed control strategy consists of a multi-proportional resonant controller (MPRC) whose parameters are assigned with particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The optimization function is defined to minimize the tracking error at the specific harmonics considering the stability limitations. In this paper the performance of the proposed controller is investigated for a single DG unit. Due to the fact that DG units can be decentralized, this strategy generalizes for multi-DG unit networks. The performance of the proposed control scheme is verified by using digital time-domain simulation studies in the PSCAD/EMTDC software environment.