African Vulture Optimization-Based Optimal Control Strategy for Voltage Control of Islanded DC Microgrids

DC microgrids have gained a lot of interest recently due to increasing dc loads such as electric vehicles and the penetration of renewable energy sources (RESs). However, DC microgrids face challenges concerning bus voltage fluctuations, which severely impact the system stability when subjected to uncertainties of load and RESs. This paper focuses on maintaining the stability of a DC-bus through voltage control for a dc islanded microgrid using the concept of cascade double-loop control. The rule in cascade double-loop control is based on a proportional-integral (PI) controller tuned through a new nature-inspired African vulture optimization algorithm (AVOA). The paper presents a comparison of the performance of the African vulture optimization algorithm against particle swarm optimization (PSO) under several operating conditions. The simulation considers actual data for the solar irradiance and temperature and sudden load changes. The system is implemented on MATLAB/Simulink. The results demonstrate that the AVOA-based PI controller performs better in voltage regulation than the PSO-based PI controller.