AC unbalanced and DC load management in multi-bus residential microgrid integrated with hybrid capacity resources

Abstract

This paper presents a control scheme including resources and load management in the residential DC microgrid. The DC microgrid is supported by fuel-cell, solar-cell and battery. The DC, AC single-phase and AC three-phase loads with 50 Hz frequency are integrated. The DC microgrid is connected to the external 60 Hz AC three-phase network. An efficient multi-bus topology is proposed for the microgrid and it is formed by various AC/DC buses to supply the loads and managing the resources. The main bus of system is a 470 V DC bus and it is connected to the external 440 V/60 Hz AC grid. The main DC bus supplies three LV, MV and HV DC buses with 100, 220, and 110–380 V, respectively. The HV DC bus produces a variable output DC voltage between 110 and 380 V in order to regulate the load power (i.e., motor speed). The MV DC bus is connected to 220 V/50 Hz AC single-phase loads. The connections between DC microgrid with AC loads and AC external gird are made by single-phase or three-phase inverters. The interface inverters between DC bus and AC loads are operated to control power, torque, speed, frequency and voltage of loads. The unbalanced AC loads are appropriately balanced by proper control of interface inverters. The resources and inverters are efficiently controlled to enable operation of residential building under both off-grid or grid-tied conditions. The coordination of fuel-cell, solar-cell and battery can supply a fixed 8 kW power to external grid and supply the internal loads under all outages and off-grid conditions. The simulations demonstrate that the proposed control realizes all the objectives including AC/DC load management, unbalanced load amendment, frequency adaptation, and off-grid operation.