Improved Control Strategy of Grid-Forming Inverters for Fault Ride-Through in a Microgrid System

Abstract

This paper develops an improved control strategy of grid-forming (GFM) inverters with fault ride-through capabilities to guarantee the stable operation of microgrids under fault conditions, especially islanded microgrids and asymmetrical faults. The proposed control strategy includes the dual control of positive-sequence and negative-sequence control as well as the adaptive virtual impedance (VI) control. Unlike existing works, the proposed strategy applies the VI control for only the d component of the positive-sequence control and leaves the <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$q$</tex> component of the positive-sequence control and the <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$dq$</tex> component of the negative-sequence control as zero, thus achieving improved stability and balanced three-phase voltages under asymmetrical faults. The adaptive feature of the VI control guarantees the stability of the GFM inverter under severe faults, which could cause the saturation of the inner current loop and instability if the VI is not adaptive. Simulation results of various unbalanced faults with high- and low-fault impedances show that the proposed control strategy improves the stability of the GFM inverter and achieves stable and balanced output voltages in islanded microgrids. And the algorithm also improves the stability of GFM inverters under balanced faults with high- and low-fault impedances.