Distributed low voltage ride-through operation of power converters in grid-connected microgrids under voltage sags

Abstract

With the increasing penetration of renewable energy, microgrids (MGs) have gained a great attention over the past decade. However, a sudden cut out of the MGs due to grid fault may lead to adverse effects to the grid. As a consequence, reactive power injection provided by MGs is preferred since it can make the MG a contributor in smooth ride through the faults. In this paper, a reactive power support strategy using droop controlled converters is proposed to aid MG riding through three phase symmetrical voltage sags. In such a case, the MGs should inject reactive power to the grid to boost the voltage in all phases at AC common bus. However, since the line admittances from each converter to point of common coupling (PCC) are not identical, the injected reactive power may not be equally shared. In order to achieve low voltage ride through (LVRT) capability along with a good power sharing accuracy, a hierarchical control strategy is proposed in this paper. Droop control and virtual impedance is applied in primary control loop while secondary control loop is based on dynamic consensus algorithm (DCA). Experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.