Adaptive Droop Control Applied to Distributed Generation Inverters Connected to the Grid

Juan C. Vsquez, Josep M. Guerrero

Dept. Automatic Control Systems and Computer Eng. Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya Urgell 187-08036-Barcelona, Spain

Eduard Gregorio, Pedro Rodrguez

Department of Electrical Engineering Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya Colom 1-08222-Terrassa, Spain

Remus Teodorescu, Frede Blaabjerg

Institute of Energy Technology Aalborg University 9220 Aalborg East, Denmark

Abstract-This paper proposes a novel control for voltage source inverters connected to the grid. The control scheme is based on the droop method, and it uses some estimated variables from the grid such as the voltage and the frequency, and the magnitude and angle of the grid impedance. Hence, the inverter is able to inject independently active and reactive power to the grid. The controller provides a proper dynamics decoupled from the grid impedance. Simulation results are provided in order to show the feasibility of the control proposed.

II.

VOLTAGE AND CURRENT MONITORING AT THE PCC BY USING A SOGI-FLL

I.

INTRODUCTION

Distributed generation systems and microgrids are taking importance when trying to increase the renewable energy penetration. In this sense, the use of intelligent power interfaces between the sources and the grid is mandatory. Usually, in order to inject energy to the grid current-source inverters (CSI) are used, while in island or autonomous operation voltage-source inverters (VSI) are used [1]. Voltage sources inverters are very interesting since they dont need any external reference to stay synchronized [2], [3]. In fact, they can operate in parallel with other inverters by using frequency and voltage droops, forming autonomous microgrids [4]. When these inverters are required to operate in grid-connected mode, they often change its behavior from voltage to current sources [5]. To achieve flexible microgrids, which are able to operate in both grid connected and island mode, VSIs are required [6]. The droop method can be used to inject active and reactive power from the VSI to the grid by adjusting the frequency and amplitude of the output voltage [2]-[4]. However, the conventional droop method needs for the knowledge of some parameters of the grid in order to inject independently active and reactive power. In this paper, we propose a control scheme based on the droop method which automatically adjusts their parameters by using an estimation method of the grid impedance based on power variations caused by the VSI at the point of common coupling (PCC). ___________________
This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology under grants CICYT ENE 2006-15521-C03-01/CON and ENE2007-67878C02-01/ALT.

The grid characterization technique used in this paper is based on processing the voltage and current phasors at the point of PCC between the power converter and the grid. To monitoring such voltage and current phasors, the frequency locked loop based on the second order generalized integrator (SOGI-FLL) is used due to its high precision, low computational cost and frequency adaptation capability [7]. A SOGI is a frequency-adjustable resonator which can be implemented by two cascaded integrators working in a closeloop [8]. Since the SOGI acts as an ideal integrator for a sinusoidal input at a particular frequency, the adaptive filter seen in Fig. 1 (SOGI-AF) can be easily implemented. Transfer functions of this filter are given by (1), where and k set the center frequency and damping factor respectively.
D( s ) =
Q( s ) =
E ( s) =

v k s ( s) = 2 , v s + k s + 2
qv k 2 ( s) = 2 , v s + k s + 2

(1a) (1b) (1c)

v
v

( s) =

s 2 + 2 . s + k s + 2
2

Fig. 1. SOGI-based adaptive filter (SOGI-AF)

v
qv

Transfer functions of (1) reveal that the system depicted in of Fig. 1 simultaneously acts as a band-pass, low-pass and notch filter on the input signal v. If v is a sinusoidal signal, v and qv will be sinusoidal signals as well, being qv 90-lagged respect v independently of both the frequency of v and the

978-1-4244-1666-0/08/$25.00 '2008 IEEE

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values of and k. This interesting characteristic is used later to obtain the V phasor representing the instantaneous voltage v. The error signal v is zero when the tuning frequency matches to the frequency of the input signal v. Therefore, this error signal is used to render the filter frequency-adaptive by adding an extra frequency-locking loop. Fig. 2 shows the Bode diagram of E(s) and Q(s). This diagram reveals that v and -qv are in counterphase when < and they are in phase when > . Therefore, a frequency error signal f can be achieved by multiplying both signals, this is: f = qv v . (2) The mean value of f is negative when < and vice versa, being only zero when = . Since only the dc-value of f is of interest here, a frequency-locked loop (FLL) can be easily achieved by applying an integral controller with a gain of to this frequency error signal as Fig. 3 shows.
10 0 M agnitude (dB) -10 -20 -30 -40 -50 180 135 Phase (deg) 90 45 0 -45

E (s)

Q ( s )

Phase of Q ( s )

reference frame. Therefore, a crucial issue in the right detection of the phasor V is that keeps rigorously equal to the grid frequency through different samples of the voltage v. When v is transiently altered by any cause, e.g. by the action of a grid-connected inverter performing droop-control, the detected frequency will experiment a transitory evolution toward the steady state frequency . Such transitory values of should be discarded by the integration block calculating the angle . In this work, this feature is achieved by setting a sampling-time at the input of the integration block higher than the transitory interval of . The aforementioned SOGI-FLL is also applied to monitoring the current injected into the PCC i in order to obtain the current phasor I = id + jiq . The fact that the SOGI-FLL acts as a selective filter for detecting two in-quadrature output signals, see (1), is a very interesting feature to attenuate harmonics on the monitored voltage and current and accurately detect the phasors V and I at the fundamental grid frequency. The detected voltage and current in-quadrature signals should be projected on the same d-q rotating reference frame to obtain coherent voltage and current phasors. Therefore, as shown in Fig. 5, the FLL block is only implemented on the monitored voltage v and the angle is calculated from the integration of the voltage frequency. III. IDENTIFICATION OF THE GRID PARAMETERS

f <0
Phase of E ( s )
10
0

f >0

-90 -1 10

10

10

10

10

Frequency (Hz)

Fig. 2. Frequency adaptation principle of the SOGI-FLL

qv

The general form of the droop-control method results from a linear interpretation of the grid in which distributed power generators are connected to. Therefore, the grid can be seen from the PCC of a power generator as a simple Thevenin circuit constituted by a grid impedance Zg and a header voltage Vg. Even though the v-i characteristic of the ac grid can not be represented by a simple two-dimensional Cartesian plane, Fig. 4 helps to illustrate further explanations about the impedance detection method used in this work since it depicts the relationship between voltage and current phasors at the PCC for a particular frequency.

qv
1

ff

V pcc
Vg

V pcc Zg I pcc
I sc

Fig. 3. Diagram of the SOGI-FLL

The voltage phasor V = vd + jvq representing the sinusoidal voltage v at the frequency is obtained by projecting the two in-quadrature signals [v; qv] on a rotating d-q reference frame, that is:
vd v cos( ) sin( ) (3) v = [Tdq ] ; [Tdq ] = , qv sin( ) cos( ) q where is obtained by integrating the detected frequency . This frequency is the angular speed of the d-q rotating

I pcc

Fig. 4. v-i characteristic of the grid for a particular frequency

From the measurement of the voltage and current phasors at the PCC at two different operating points, linearity in the v-i

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characteristic of Fig. 4 allows writing (4), (5) and (6) for estimating the grid impedance Z g , the open-circuit voltage Vg , and the short-circuit current I sc of the grid, respectively. V pcc V1 V2 Zg = Zg g = = (4) I1 I 2 I pcc
Vg = Vg g = V pcc (i ) Z g I pcc (i ) = I sc = I sc sc = I pcc (i ) V pcc (i ) Zg = I1V2 I 2V1 I1 I 2 I 2V1 I1V2 V1 V2

IV.

ADAPTIVE DROOP CONTROL

In this section, based on the estimation of the grid parameters provided by the identification algorithm, an adaptive droop controller able to inject active and reactive power into the grid with high accuracy is proposed.

(5) (6)

A. Power flow analysis From Fig. 4 we can calculate the active P and reactive Q powers injected to the grid by the VSI [15], [16] 1 ( EV cos V 2 ) cos + EV sin sin g P= (7a) Zg
Q= 1 ( EV cos V 2 ) sin EV sin cos g Zg

where Z g and g are the magnitude and the angle grid impedance, respectively. Several techniques for detecting the grid impedance are either directly or indirectly based on this basic principle. A well known technique consists on processing the voltage and current variations at the PCC caused by the connection of different loads [9]. Other techniques process the voltage at the PCC after injecting noncharacteristic current harmonics into the grid [10][11]. There are also techniques in which either nonsinusoidal, amplitude modulated or wideband frequency currents are injected to the grid for processing the voltage variation at the PCC [12]-[14]. In this work, the grid parameters are estimated from the active and reactive power variations generated by a grid-connected converter in which a droop-controller is implemented. The cornerstone of this estimation technique is the accuracy in the on-line measurement of voltage and currents phasors at the PCC, which is performed by the system based on the SOGI-FLL described in II. Fig. 5 shows the whole diagram of the algorithm used in this work to identify the grid parameters. It is worth to say that the estimated values for Z g , Vg and I sc are transiently wrong after each change in the grid parameters. These transient values can not be sent to the droop-controller of the grid-connected inverter. For this reason, a small buffer of three rows is added at the output of the grid parameters identification block of Fig. 5. The value of any grid parameter used by the droop-control only will be updated when the differences between all the three values stored in the three-row buffer are inside a 5% tolerance band.

(7b)

where E and are the magnitude and phase of the VSI, V is the grid voltage respectively. Notice that both expressions depend highly on the grid impedance (Z). Consequently, we propose to transform P and Q to novel variables, which are independent from the magnitude and phase of the grid impedance: (8a) Pc = Z g ( P sin Q cos )
Qc = Z g ( P cos + Q sin )

(8b)

being Pc(s) and Qc(s) the linear compensators of the phase and the amplitude. By substituting (7) into (8), it yields the following expressions: Pc = EV sin (9a) (9b) Note that Pc is mainly dependent on the phase , while Qc is depends on the voltage difference between the VSI and the grid (E V). These control variables (Pc and Qc) are independent from the grid impedance, so we can use them into the droop control method to inject active and reactive power.

Qc = EV cos V 2

i pcc

v pcc

i qi

Tdq

i
v qv

id iq

Zg

Tdq
vd vq

Vg
I sc

v
qv

ss

Fig. 5. Block diagram of the grid parameters identification algorithm

B. Droop control technique In order to inject the desired active and reactive powers (defined as P* and Q*), the following droop method which uses the transformation (8) is proposed = G p ( s ) Z g ( P P* ) sin g ( Q Q* ) cos g (10a) E = E * Gq ( s ) Z g ( P P* ) cos g + ( Q Q* ) sin g (10b) Fig. 6 shows the block diagram of the implementation of the droop controller to inject the desired active P* and reactive power Q*. Gp(s) and Gq(s) are the compensator transfer functions of Pc and Qc, respectively mi + m p s + md s 2 G p ( s) = (11a) s ni + n p s Gq ( s ) = (11b) s

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Note that in practice the derivative term in Gq(s) is avoided since it barely affects to the system dynamics.
P*
P
+

( s) =

Pc
P/Q Decoupling Transformation

G p (s)

Adaptive Droop Controller

mi + m p s + md s 2 s
s

( e s) =

V sin e( s ) + VE cos ( s ) (17a) 1 + (T 2 ) s ni + n p s V cos e( s ) VE sin ( s ) . (17b)

1 + (T 2 ) s

E*

By combining (17a) and (17b), it can be obtained the following fourth order characteristic equation
Vref *

Q*

(Eq.8)

Qc

Gq ( s )

Vc * = E sin( t )

a4 s 4 + a3 s 3 + a2 s 2 + a1 s + a0 = 0

(18)

Being
a4 = T 2 + 2Tmd VEcos a3 = 4T + 4md n pV 2 E + 2Vcos ( 2md E + Tn p + Tm p E ) a1 = 4Vcos ( ni + mi E ) + 4V 2 E ( mi n p + m p ni ) a0 = 4ni mi EV 2

Zg

Droop functions

Fig. 6. Block diagram of the adaptive droop control.

a2 = 2Vcos (Tmi E + Tni + 2n p + 2m p ) + 4V 2 E ( m p n p + md ni ) + 4

C. System dynamics A small signal analysis is provided, in order to show the system stability and the transient response, allowing the designer to adjust the control parameters [17-18]. Taking into account that P and Q are the average values of instantaneous active and reactive power p(t) and q(t) 1 t T P = vd id + vq iq = p (t )dt (12a) T t 1 t T Q = vq id vd iq = q (t )dt (12b) T t being T the period of the grid frequency. By using the first order Pad approximation, 2 Ts e Ts (13) 2 + Ts the average value P and Q can be expressed as follows 1 e Ts 1 (14a) P= Pi Pi s 1 + (T 2 ) s
Q= 1 e Ts 1 Qi Qi . Ts 1 + (T 2 ) s

Where the steady-state values of the active and reactive power are P = P* and Q = Q*, and, from (7), the steady-state phase and amplitudes can be calculated as follows P* sin g Q* cos g , (19a) = tan 1 * P cos g + Q* sin g + V 2 Z g 2 V cos g + PZ g E= (19b) V cos g cos + sin g sin

V.

SIMULATION RESULTS

(14b)

By substituting (10) into (14), and doing a small signal approximation in order to linearize the equations, it yields 1 pc ( s ) = V sin e( s ) + VE cos ( s ) (15a) 1 + (T 2 ) s

The control proposed was tested through proper simulations of a single-phase VSI connected to the grid. Table I shows the main control and system parameters used. Fig. 7 shows the transient response of P and Q for changes step in P* (from 1500 to 2000 W at t=1s) and Q* (from 500 to 250 VAr at t=2s). Note the good decoupling of P and Q injection. Fig. 8 shows the good resemblance between the system phase dynamics and the model (18). The model has been proved for wide system parameters, showing its validity. By using that model, we can extract the root locus family that can be seen in Figs. 9, 10, and 11, by changing mp, md, and nd. In order to guarantee the stability condition (input/output behavior) of the closed-loop system dynamics, a poles study of the fourth order identified model is employed. The performance of this kind of systems is often viewed in terms of a pole dominance set of it can be seen. In one hand, the A0 coefficient of the characteristic equation depends basically of mi and ni parameters that influence directly over the fast response of the system making it more damped. In some practical cases is possible to adjust this parameters for finetuning purposes. The fourth order system can be simplified to a third, second, or even first-order system.

qc ( s ) =

1 V cos e( s ) VE sin ( s ) 1 + (T 2 ) s

(15b)

where the low-case variables with the symbol ^ indicate small signal values, and uppercase variables are the steady-state values. By using (10), (11) and (15), it can be obtained mi + m p s + md s 2 (s) = (16a) pc ( s ) s ni + n p s ( e s) = (16b) qc ( s ) . s From (16), it can be derived the following expressions

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Fig. 12 shows an example of P dynamics, using the control without and with the Z estimation loop, for grid impedance variations (R = 1, 2, and 3 ). As it can be seen, this loop decouples to a large extend the dynamics from the grid impedance.
Phase [rd]

10

x 10

-3

Symbol V

R L Z

S mi mp md ni np

TABLE I. SYSTEM PARAMETERS Parameter Value Grid voltage amplitude 311 Grid frequency 50 Grid resistance 2 Grid inductance 3 Grid impedance module 2.3 Grid impedance angle 28.8 Nominal apparent power 4 Integral droop Pc coefficient 0.0018 Proportional droop Pc coefficient 0.00005 Derivative droop Pc coefficient 4107 Integral droop Qc coefficient 0.05 Proportional droop Qc coefficient 0.0004

Units V Hz mH kVA Ws/rd W/rd W/rds VArs/V VAr/V

2 Model Real

-2

0.2

0.4 Time [s]

0.6

0.8

Fig. 8. Dynamic response of the system and the model (18).

Roo t Loc u s

30

20 3

2500

Im aginary Ax is

10 1 0 2

2000

-10

P [W] & Q [VAr]

1500

-20

1000

-30 -100

-80

-60

-40

-20

R e a l A x is

500

Q
0 0 0.5 1 1.5 time [s] 2 2.5 3

Fig. 9. Root locus for 110 6 < md < 410 5.

Root Loc us 1 0.8 0.6

Im aginary Ax is

Fig. 7. Transient response of P and Q injected to the grid by the VSI.

0.4 0.2 0 - 0.2 - 0.4 - 0.6 - 0.8 -1 - 350 - 300 - 250 -200 -150 -100 - 50 0 1 4

Real A x is

Fig. 10. Root locus for 0.0004 < np < 0.01.

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Root Locus 1 0.8 0.6 0.4 Imaginary Axis 0.2 0 -0.2 -0.4 -0.6 -0.8 -1 -100 -90 -80 -70 -60 -50 Real Axis -40 -30 -20 -10 0

reactive power to the grid. The proposed droop control uses such parameters to close the loop, achieving a tight P and Q regulation. Thanks to the feedback variables of the estimator, the system dynamics is well decoupled from the grid parameters. The results point out the applicability of the proposed control scheme to distributed generation VSIs for microgrid applications. REFERENCES
[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] P.L.Villeneuve, Concerns generated by islanding, IEEE Power &Energy Magazine, May/June 2004, pp. 49-53. T. Kawabata and S. Higashino, Parallel operation of voltage source inverters, IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 24, no. 2, March/April 1988, pp. 281-287. M.C.Chandorkar and D. M. Divan, Control of parallel connected inverters in standalone ac supply system, IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 29, no. 1, pp. 136-143, Jan./Feb. 1993. S. Barsali, M. Ceraolo, P. Pelachi, and D. Polim Control techniques of dispersed generators to improve the continuity of electricity supply, in Proc. IEEE PES-Winter Meeting02, 2002, pp. 789-794. R. Teodorescu and F. Blaabjerg, Flexible control of small wind turbines with grid failure detection operating in stand-alone and grid-connected mode, IEEE Trans. Power Electron., vol. 9, no. 5, Sept. 2004, pp 13231332. J. M. Guerrero, J. Matas, L. Garcia de Vicua, M. Castilla, and J. Miret, Decentralized control for parallel operation of distributed generation inverters using resistive output impedance, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., vol. 54, no. 2, April 2007, pp. 994-1004. P. Rodriguez, A. Luna, M. Ciobotaru, R. Teodorescu, and F. Blaabjerg, "Advanced Grid Synchronization System for Power Converters under Unbalanced and Distorted Operating Conditions," in Proc. of IEEE Ind. Electron. (IECON06), 2006, pp.5173-5178. X. Yuan, W. Merk, H. Stemmler, and J. Allmeling, Stationary-frame generalized integrators for current control of active power filters with zero steady-state error for current harmonics of concern under unbalanced and distorted operating conditions, IEEE Trans. on Ind Applicat., vol. 38, pp.523 532, Mar./Apr. 2002. A. de Oliveira, A., J.C. de Oliveira, J.W. Resende, and M.S. Miskulin, "Practical approaches for AC system harmonic impedance measurements," IEEE Trans. on Power Delivery, vol.6, pp.1721-1726, 1991. L. Asiminoaei, R. Teodorescu, F. Blaabjerg, and U. Borup, "Implementation and Test of an Online Embedded Grid Impedance Estimation Technique for PV Inverters," IEEE Trans. on Ind. Electron., vol.52, no.4, pp. 1136-1144, 2005 F. Bertling and S. Soter, A novel converter integrable impedance measuring method for islanding detection in grids with widespread use of decentral generation, in Proc. of Power Electron., Elect. Drives, Automation and Motion, 2006, pp. 503507. M. Sumner, B. Palethorpe, and D.W.P. Thomas, "Impedance measurement for improved power quality-Part 2: a new technique for stand-alone active shunt filter control," IEEE Trans. on Power Delivery, vol.19, no.3, pp. 1457-1463, 2004. J. Huang and K.A. Corzine, "Ac impedance measurement by line-to-line injected current," in Proc. of IEEE Ind. Applicat. Conf. (IAS06), 2006, pp.300-306. J.P. Rhode, A.W. Kelley, and M.E. Baran, "Complete characterization of utilization-voltage power system impedance using wideband measurement," IEEE Trans. on Ind. Electron. Applicat., vol.33, no.6, pp.1472-1479, 1997. A. R. Bergen. Power Systems Analysis. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1986. J. M. Guerrero, J. Matas, L. Garca de Vicua, M. Castilla, and J. Miret, Wireless-control strategy for parallel operation of distributed-generation inverters, IEEE Trans. Power Electron., vol. 53, no. 5, Oct. 2006. E. A. A. Coelho, P. Cabaleiro, and P. F. Donoso Small Signal Stability for Single Phase Inverter Connected to Stiff AC System, in Proc. IEEE IAS99, 1999, pp. 2180-2187. J. M. Guerrero, J. C. Vsquez, J. Matas, J. L. Sosa, and L. Garca de Vicua, Parallel Operation of Uninterruptible Power Supply Systems in MicroGrids, Proc. EPE07, 2007, pp. 1-9.

Fig. 11. Root locus for 0.00005 < mp < 0.0001.

1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0 -200 0 0.5 1 1.5 R=1 R=2 R=3 2

[6]

[7]

[8]

(a)
1600 1400 1200 1000 800 600 400 200 0 -200 0 0.5 1 1.5 R=1 R=2 R=3 2

[9]

[10]

[11]

[12]

[13] [14]

(b) Fig. 12. Start up of P for different line impedances, (a) without and (b) with the estimation of Z.

VI.

CONCLUSION

[15] [16] [17] [18]

In this paper has been presented a novel control for VSI connected to the grid that is able to inject active and reactive power. The control has two main structures. The first one is the grid parameters estimation, which calculates the amplitude and frequency of the grid, as well as the magnitude and phase of the grid impedance. The second one is a droop control scheme, which uses these parameters to inject independently active and

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