Secondary Control Strategies in the DC Microgrids

Abstract

Now, DC microgrids have become more popular for several reasons, including the lack of issues related to reactive power and frequency control, the direct integration of energy storage devices and solar photovoltaic, and the higher utilization of DC loads. A DC microgrid using several sources (distributed generation) is a popular research area. The main issue in such a DC microgrid is to provide good voltage regulation and proportional power sharing among all sources. Control strategy is very important to solve the above issue in order to maintain the reliability and stability of DC microgrids. Hence, a comprehensive review of DC microgrid control techniques is essential. Compared to other methods, hierarchical control is widely used to solve the aforementioned issue. It consists of three layers of control: primary control, secondary control, and tertiary control. At the primary level, to improve current sharing performance, droop control is usually applied. Secondary control is used for voltage regulation of the DC bus. A tertiary control is a higher-level control to achieve Optimization and economical grid operation. In traditional primary control, it is not possible to attain accurate power sharing and voltage regulation simultaneously. Thus, secondary control is required. So, this paper reviews the secondary level control techniques in the hierarchical control strategy for DC microgrids. Precisely, Centralized, distributed, and decentralized approach-based secondary control are reviewed. Several secondary control techniques have been thoroughly examined in terms of their advantages and disadvantages making this an excellent resource for both academics and business executives.