FPGA-Based Design of Grid Friendly Appliance Controller

Abstract

This paper presents a FPGA (field programmable gate array)-based design of Grid Friendly Appliance (GFA) controller. A GFA controller can monitor the frequency of the power system and switch on or off the electrical appliance accordingly, to support the stability of the power system. In this paper, FPGA chip is adopted to develop GFA controller for real-time applications. The proposed method detects the power system frequency by a digital phase-locked loop (PLL), and compares the frequency with a threshold. If the frequency drops below the threshold, the GFA controller output a switching off signal to shed some load. In order to compensate the trigging response delay, a proportional-derivative (PD) predictor is designed for the controller. The proposed method is validated by the co-simulation results of Quartus II and Matlab. The hardware-based GFA controller is developed in Quartus II, and the frequency response model is developed in Matlab software, separately. The co-simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.