VFD-based Coordinated Centralized/decentralized Control to Support Offshore Electrical Power Systems with Wind Power Penetration

Abstract

This paper proposes a coordinated centralized/decentralized control designed to concomitantly manage the power factor and mitigate voltage variations at the main feeder of an oil and gas offshore platform. The centralized action (i.e., power factor control) is decoupled from the decentralized one (i.e., voltage support) due to the significant disparity in dynamics of the commands sent to the active front-end variable frequency drives (AFE-VFDs). The AFE-VFDs are embedded with a proposed V-Q inverse droop curve, while being remotely coordinated by a central controller using a low-bandwidth communication link. Unlike other strategies, the proposed control is effective in handling unplanned events and unpredictable disturbances. Simulations are conducted to compare the proposed strategy with a literature solution considering a typical Brazilian floating production storage and offloading platform, from Mero Oil Field.