Adaptive Armature Resistance Control of Virtual Synchronous Generators to Improve Power System Transient Stability

Abstract

The growing number of renewable energy plants connected to the power system through static converters have been pushing the development of new strategies to ensure transient stability of these systems. The virtual synchronous generator (VSG) emerged as a way to contribute to the system stabilization by emulating the behavior of traditional synchronous machines in the power converters operation. This paper proposes a modification in the VSG implementation to improve its contribution to the power system transient stability. The proposal is based on the virtualization of the resistive superconducting fault current limiters’ (SFCL) behavior through an adaptive control that performs the VSG armature resistance change in short-circuit situations. A theoretical analysis of the problem is done based on the equal-area criterion, simulation results are obtained using PSCAD, and experimental results are obtained in a Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) test bench to corroborate the proposal. Results show an increase in the system transient stability margin, with an increase in the fault critical clearing time (CCT) for all virtual resistance values added by the adaptive control to the VSG operation during the short-circuit.