Compensation of droop control using common load condition in DC microgrids to improve voltage regulation and load sharing

DC microgrid is one feasible and effective solution to integrate renewable energy resources, as well as to supply reliable electricity. The control objective of DC microgrids is to obtain system stability, low voltage regulation and equal load sharing in per unit. The droop control is an effectively method adopted to implement the control of microgrids with multiple distributed energy units. However in the application of low-voltage DC microgrids, the nominal reference mismatch and unequal cable resistances require a trade-off to be made between voltage regulation and load sharing. In this paper, a unified compensation framework is proposed using the common load condition in local controller, to compensate the voltage drop and load sharing errors. The voltage deviation is compensated with a P controller while the load sharing is compensated through a PI controller. An additional low bandwidth communication is introduced to share the output current information, and the average output current in per unit is generated to represent the common load condition. The performance of the proposed method is analyzed and compared with basic droop control and hierarchical structure method. The large signal stability is analyzed to define the margin of compensation coefficients. Simulations and experiments are carried out to verify the performance of the proposed method. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.