Refined Hybrid Microgrid Architecture for the Improvement of Voltage Profile

Abstract

Hybrid microgrid is emerging as a flexible and modular solution that integrates various heterogeneous energy resources and loads. This conventional hybrid microgrid architecture can also reduce the number of power conversion stages, when compared to other architectures of microgrid such as, centralized DC bus and centralized AC bus architectures. But, these conventional hybrid microgrid architectures are having poor fault tolerant capacity that leads to severe power imbalances in the microgrid system. With this aspect, this paper propose the refined hybrid microgrid architecture that can handle system uncertainties and improves the voltage profile. The proposed refined hybrid microgrid architecture consists of two layers (AC layer and DC layer) through which each and every constituent of the microgrid is connected. This provides continuity in power supply to the microgrid loads via the possibility of bi-directional power flow between AC layer and DC layer. The proposed architecture is simulated using MATLAB/Simulink®. From the results, it is observed that, this proposed refined hybrid microgrid architecture improves the voltage profile of the system during faults.