The rapid decrease in conventional energy resources and their harmful impact on the environment has brought the attention of the researchers towards the use of renewable energy technologies. The renewable energy systems are connected to Direct Current (DC) micro-grids via power electronic converters where the load conditions are unknown and network parameters are uncertain. These conditions call for the use of robust control techniques such as Sliding Mode Control (SMC) in order to regulate the grid voltage. However, SMC has a drawback of operating the power converter at variable switching frequency which results in degrading the power quality. This paper introduces a fixed frequency sliding mode controller that does not suffer from this predicament. A novel double integral type switching manifold is proposed to achieve voltage regulation of a DC micro-grid, in the presence of unknown load demands and un-modeled dynamics of the network. Rigorous mathematical analysis is carried out for the stability of the closed loop system and the technique is experimentally validated on position of a DC micro-grid using a specially designed test rig. For benchmarking purposes, a conventional Proportional Integral (PI) controller is also implemented. An improvement of 2.5% in rise time, 6.7% in settling time and reduction of voltage dip by 31.7% during load transaction is achieved as compared to the PI controller. The experiment confirms the hypothesis that fixed frequency SMC shows better performance than its counterpart in the phase of introduced disturbances.
The rising cost of fossil fuels, their high depleting rate and issues regarding environmental pollution have brought the attention of the researchers towards renewable energy technologies. Different renewable energy resources like wind turbines, fuel cells and solar cells are connected to DC micro grid through controllable power electronic converters. In presence of these diverse generation units, robust controllers are required to ensure good power quality and to regulate grid voltage. This paper presents a sliding mode control based methodology to address the above mentioned challenges. The proposed technique keeps the switching frequency constant so that electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) issues can be solved with conventional filter design. Parallel operation of converter in DC micro gird is considered. Chattering reduction and power quality improvement by harmonic cancellation is proposed. A scaled down hardware for unregulated 11.5 V to 17.5 V input and 24V output is designed and tested.The experimental results show good performance of the controller under different loads and uncertain input voltage conditions. Moreover, the results show the robustness of the closed loop system to sudden variations in load conditions. Furthermore, a significant improvement in power quality is achieved by harmonic cancellation of chattering in the output of the converters.
The key issue in the implementation of the Sliding Mode Control (SMC) in analogue circuits and power electronic converters is its variable switching frequency. The drifting frequency causes electromagnetic compatibility issues and also adversely affect the efficiency of the converter, because the proper size of the inductor and the capacitor depends upon the switching frequency. Pulse Width Modulation based SMC (PWM-SMC) offers the solution, however, it uses either boundary layer approach or employs pulse width modulation of the ideal equivalent control signal. The first technique compromises the performance within the boundary layer, while the latter may not possess properties like robustness and order reduction due to the absence of the discontinuous function. In this research, a novel approach to fix the switching frequency in SMC is proposed, that employs a low pass filter to extract the equivalent control from the discontinuous function, such that the performance and robustness remains intact. To benchmark the experimental observations, a comparison with existing double integral type PWM-SMC is also presented. The results confirm that an improvement of 20% in the rise time and 25.3% in the settling time is obtained. The voltage sag during step change in load is reduced to 42.86%, indicating the increase in the robustness. The experiments prove the hypothesis that a discontinuous function based fixed frequency SMC performs better in terms of disturbances rejection as compared to its counterpart based solely on ideal equivalent control.
The key characteristics of the sliding mode control (SMC) are the ability to manage unmodeled dynamics with rapid response and the inherent robustness of parametric differences, making it an appropriate choice for the control of power electronic converters. However, its drawback of changing switching frequency causes critical electro-magnetic compatibility and switching power loss issues. This paper addresses the problem by proposing a dynamic integral sliding mode control for power converters having fixed switching frequency. A special hardware test rig is developed and tested under unregulated 12.5-22.5 V input and 30 V output. The experimental findings indicate excellent controller efficiency under wide range of loads and uncertain input voltage conditions. In addition, the findings indicate that the closed-loop system is robust to sudden differences in load conditions. This technique provides an improvement of [Formula: see text]% in the rise time, [Formula: see text]% in the settling time and [Formula: see text]% in robustness of the controller as compared to conventional controllers. Furthermore, the comparison with the existing fixed-frequency sliding mode control techniques is presented in a tabular form.
In this paper, improvement in the power transfer capacity of transmission lines (TLs) by utilizing a multi-terminal high voltage direct current (MT-HVDC) grid is discussed. A multi-terminal HVDC grid designed for wind power can be used as an extra transmission path in interconnected systems during low wind conditions, and provides extra dynamic stability and security. This paper deals with the power transfer capacity as well as the small signal (SS) stability assessments in less damped oscillations accompanying inter area modes. Computation of the maximum allowable power transfer capability is assessed via DC optimal power flow-based control architecture, permitting more power transfer with a definite security margin. The test system is assessed with and without the exploitation of MT-HVDC grid. Simulation work is done using a generic computational framework i.e., international council on large electric systems (CIGRE) B4 test bench with a Kundur’s two area system, shows that voltage source converters (VSCs) provide excellent control and flexibility, improving the power transfer capability keeping the system stable.
Variable voltage and frequency are required to govern the torque-speed characteristics of many industrial drive systems. Traditionally, this is achieved with a power converting system implemented with multistage converters. This technology is based on rectifying AC power into DC and then DC into AC with an inverter circuit. The power quality concerns of both conversion stages are tackled by selecting high switching frequency PWM control and harmonics mitigation filters. Also, using a bulky DC-link capacitor is one of the big sources of low system reliability, so this approach increases the conversion losses, circuit, and control complications. The frequency step-down conversion is very attractive with direct AC-AC converters as it has a simple control and circuit structure, but these converters face poor power quality challenges once the output frequency is decreased with respect to an input. In these converters, the total harmonic distortion (THD) of the output voltage becomes very poor once the output frequency is reduced. The problem of high THD of the output is addressed in the power converting circuits implemented with line frequency multi-winding transformers. The required number of output winding and switching devices (diodes and thyristors) increases once the value of the output frequency is decreased. This will increase the overall volume, cost, and losses. The use of a bulky and costly line frequency transformer may be eliminated if AC voltage controllers have non-inverted and inverted voltage buck capabilities, such existing topologies either have complex control schemes or require a large number of operating devices. Therefore, in this research article, a new transformerless frequency step-down converter employing fewer devices is proposed. This approach is realized with a high-frequency controlled rectifier for the required voltage stabilization and a low-frequency inverter bridge for frequency control. Its validation is supported by the results attained from Simulink and practical-based prototypes.
The advantages offered by DC microgrids, such as elimination of skin effect losses, no requirement of frequency synchronization and high efficiency for power transmission are the major reasons that microgrids have attracted the attention of researchers in the last decade. Moreover, the DC friendly nature of renewable energy resources makes them a perfect choice for integration with DC microgrids, resulting in increased reliability and improved stability. However, in order to integrate renewable energy resources with the DC microgrids, challenges like equal load sharing and voltage regulation of the busbar under diverse varying load conditions are to be addressed. Conventionally, droop control with PI compensation is used to serve this purpose. However, this cascaded scheme results in poor regulation to large load variations and steady state errors. To address this issue, this paper presents a sliding mode control-based approach. Key features of SMC are its ease of implementation, robustness to load variations, and fast dynamic response. The system model is derived and simulated to analyze the stability and performance of the proposed controller. An experimental test bench is developed to demonstrate the effectiveness of SMC against modeled dynamics and is compared with the droop controller. The results show an improvement of 26% and 27.4% in the rise time and settling time, respectively. Robustness of the proposed scheme is also tested by switching it with a step load and an improvement of 40% has been observed.
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