Candidate: Enrique Espina Gonzalez
Title: Distributed Secondary Control Applied to Hybrid AC/DC Microgrids
Date: December 11, 2020
Time: 2:30 PM
Place: REMOTE ATTENDANCE
Supervisor(s): Kazerani, Mehrdad - Simpson-Porco, John (Adjunct)
Abstract:
This Ph.D. proposal consists of the study of distributed secondary control strategies for hybrid ac/dc-microgrids. The utilization of Interlinking Converters to manage the energy exchange between the ac-side and the dc-side of the microgrid is also considered, as well as the incorporation of these converters to the distributed communication network and, hence, to the secondary control loop. The hybrid ac/dc-microgrid achieves a more secure operation due to the strengthening against single-point failures and improve its plug-and-play capability. Additionally, the absence of a central controller helps to improve the modularity of the microgrid due to the proposed distributed controllers do not need to know the variables of all the microgrid (i.e. the communication network is simplified), they only need to have some information from their nearest neighbours to achieve an accurate power-sharing of the units on both sides and a good voltage (for both sides) and frequency (for ac-side) regulation.
Secondary control strategies in hybrid ac/dc-microgrids have been conventionally designed independently for each side of the microgrid, neglecting the interaction between the ac and dc sides due to the power transferred through the interlinking converter. This has a negative effect on the power-sharing and dynamic response of the system. The proposed control scheme simultaneously regulates ac-voltage magnitude and frequency, as well as the dc-voltage magnitude, by including the interlinking converters in the control strategy via a distributed consensus approach. This improves the power-sharing accuracy and secondary control restoration of the variables in both ac and dc sides of the microgrid.