TY - GEN
T1 - Performance evaluation of four grid-forming control techniques with soft black-start capabilities
AU - Alassi, Abdulrahman
AU - Ahmed, Khaled
AU - Egea Alvarez, Agusti
AU - Ellabban, Omar
N1 - © 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting /republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
PY - 2020/11/2
Y1 - 2020/11/2
N2 - Grid-Forming Converters (GFC) can be controlled as independent, self-starting, voltage sources. This feature is essential for power converters to achieve successful black-start sequence initiation. Conventional grid-following converters are not capable of self-starting an islanded network. GFC control thus exploits wider grid support and network restart potential. This study analyzes and compares four GFC controllers to assess their generic and soft black-start (ramping voltage) capabilities. The compared techniques are: Droop Control, Power Synchronizing Control (PSC), Virtual Synchronous Machine (VSM), and Matching control. These techniques are selected based on their direct voltage reference control flexibility. Various simulations are performed with common parameters to assess the response of each technique under similar conditions against load, DC voltage and active power reference disturbances, in addition to their soft-start readiness. The results demonstrate the high-level compatibility of these four controllers with soft black-start through successful and timely ramping voltage reference tracking. Moreover, the four considered control techniques achieve satisfactory performance, with VSM demonstrating more flexibility due to its tunable virtual inertia parameter (J).
AB - Grid-Forming Converters (GFC) can be controlled as independent, self-starting, voltage sources. This feature is essential for power converters to achieve successful black-start sequence initiation. Conventional grid-following converters are not capable of self-starting an islanded network. GFC control thus exploits wider grid support and network restart potential. This study analyzes and compares four GFC controllers to assess their generic and soft black-start (ramping voltage) capabilities. The compared techniques are: Droop Control, Power Synchronizing Control (PSC), Virtual Synchronous Machine (VSM), and Matching control. These techniques are selected based on their direct voltage reference control flexibility. Various simulations are performed with common parameters to assess the response of each technique under similar conditions against load, DC voltage and active power reference disturbances, in addition to their soft-start readiness. The results demonstrate the high-level compatibility of these four controllers with soft black-start through successful and timely ramping voltage reference tracking. Moreover, the four considered control techniques achieve satisfactory performance, with VSM demonstrating more flexibility due to its tunable virtual inertia parameter (J).
KW - performance evaluation
KW - renewable energy sources
KW - robustness
KW - machine control
KW - droop control
KW - black-start capabilities
UR - https://icrera.org/archieve2020/
U2 - 10.1109/ICRERA49962.2020.9242758
DO - 10.1109/ICRERA49962.2020.9242758
M3 - Conference contribution book
BT - 2020 9th International Conference on Renewable Energy Research and Application (ICRERA)
PB - IEEE
CY - Piscataway, N.J.
T2 - 9th IEEE International Conference on Renewable Energy Research and Applications (ICRERA) 2020
Y2 - 27 September 2020 through 30 September 2020
ER -