Reduction in Voltage Harmonics of Parallel Inverters Based on Robust Droop Controller in Islanded Microgrid

Abstract

In this article, a distributed control scheme to compensate for voltage harmonics in islanded microgrids is presented, where each distributed generation (DG) source has a primary control level and a secondary control level. In addition to the voltage and current control loops, the primary control level of DGs includes virtual impedance control loops in the main and harmonic components, which are responsible for dividing the power of the main component and the non-main component (harmonic) between the DGs of the microgrid, respectively. For coordinated operation between the inverters when facing the islanding phenomenon, it is very beneficial to use a droop controller structure. Here, the traditional droop controller is modified in such a way that the power is proportionally divided between the DGs, which causes accurate voltage regulation at the output of the DGs. By presenting a model for the inverter connected to the nonlinear load, a harmonic droop controller is designed. Through the droop controller related to each harmonic, the harmonic voltages are calculated and added to the reference voltage, which improves the quality of the output voltage. Then, the inverter voltage control loop is modified with resistive impedance in the presence of nonlinear loads in such a way that, when combined with the harmonic droop controller, the total harmonic distortion (THD) of the output voltage is significantly reduced. Lastly, the proposed method is implemented on the microgrid through MATLAB software, and the results show the ability of the proposed method to reduce voltage harmonics in the parallel operation of inverters.