Adaptive Harmonic Virtual Impedance Control for Improving Voltage Quality of Microgrids

Abstract

The effects of nonlinear loads on voltage quality represent an emerging concern for islanded microgrids. Existing research works have mainly focused on harmonic power sharing among multiple inverters, which ignores the diversity of different inverters to mitigate harmonics from nonlinear loads. As a result, the voltage quality of microgrids cannot be effectively improved. To address this issue, this study proposes an adaptive harmonic virtual impedance (HVI) control for improving voltage quality of microgrids. Based on the premise that no inverter is overloaded, the main objective of the proposed control is to maximize harmonic power absorption by shaping the lowest output impedances of inverters. To achieve this, the proposed control is utilized to adjust the HVI of each inverter based on its operation conditions. In addition, the evaluation based on Monte Carlo harmonic power flow is designed to assess the performance of the proposed control in practice. Finally, comparative studies and control-in-the-loop experiments are conducted.