Optimal Dynamic Voltage Restorer Using Water Cycle Optimization Algorithm

This paper proposes a low complexity control scheme for voltage control of a dynamic voltage restorer (DVR) in a three-phase system. The control scheme employs the fractional order, proportional-integral-derivative (FOPID) controller to improve on the DVR performance in order to enhance the power quality in terms of the response time, steady-state error and total harmonic distortion (THD). The result obtained was compared with fractional order, proportional-integral (FOPI), proportional-integral-derivative (PID) and proportional-integral (PI) controllers in order to show the effectiveness of the proposed DVR control scheme. A water cycle optimization algorithm (WCA) was utilized to find the optimal set for all the controller gains. They were used to solve four power quality issues; balanced voltage sag, balanced voltage swell, unbalanced voltage sag, and unbalanced voltage swell. It showed that one set of controller gain obtained from the WCA could solve all the power quality issues while the others in the literature needed an individual set of optimal gain for each power quality problem. To prove the concept, the proposed DVR algorithm was simulated in the MATLAB/Simulink software and the results revealed that the four optimal controllers can compensate for all the power quality problems. A comparative analysis of the results in various aspects of their dynamic response and %THD was discussed and analyzed. It was found that PID controller yields the most rapid performance in terms of average response time while FOPID controller yields the best performance in term of average % steady-state error. FOPI controller was found to provide the lowest THD percentage in the average %THD. FOPID did not differ much in average response from the PID and average %THD from FOPI; however, FOPID provided the most outstanding average steady-state error. According to the CBMA curve, the dynamic responses of all controllers fall in the acceptable power quality area. The total harmonic distortion (THD) of the compensated load voltage from all the controllers were within the 8% limit in accordance to the IEEE std. 519-2014. © 2023 CRL Publishing. All rights reserved.