Implementation of Flexible Harmonic Control Approach through Voltage Controlled DG-Grid Interfacing Converters

T.S.Shanmuga Sivam
Sathayabama University Department of Electrical & Electronics Engg., M.E (PE&ID).Samysai145@gmail.com

Mr. G.T.SUNDARAJAN
Sathayabama University Department of Electrical &Electronic Engg., Asst.Prof/EEE gts75@rediffmail.com power system and cause power quality concerns, they are also able to improve system efficiency and power quality if designed and controlled properly. To realize this function, besides the primary purpose of real power generation, many ancillary services can also be provided through the DG whenever sufficient apparent power rating is available. The additional apparent power rating is achievable due to the intermittent nature of many power electronics based DG systems (such as photovoltaic, wind, etc.). Furthermore, with the recent development of smart grid and micro grid concepts and the associated advancement of communication, instrumentation and control techniques for power electronics interfaced DG; the flexible control of DG to improve distribution system power quality is becoming a promising topic. Most of the power electronics interfaced DG systems use voltage source inverters (VSI) as the interfacing inverter. The control mechanism of an VSI mainly consists of two types: current control method (CCM) and voltage control method (VCM). Conventionally, CCM is widely adopted in active power filters (APFs) to mitigate system harmonics However, for micro grid applications, especially considering the possible autonomous islanding operation, the DG units are desired to operate with VCM as it can provide direct voltage and frequency support for the loads To facilitate the sharing of load demands, VCM based V-f droop control (real power-frequency droop and reactive power- voltage magnitude droop) is usually considered to control the DG interfacing converters. In this case, the current controlled harmonic compensation schemes which are traditionally used for APF applications cannot be implemented directly. In order to overcome this limitation, a novel VCM based harmonic control method, which does not require harmonic current reference and current tracking control loop, is developed in this paper. This paper starts with a brief review of the harmonic compensation based on CCM in Section II. The VCM based harmonic control scheme is developed and presented in Section III. The proposed VCM based scheme is more flexible and can achieve similar compensation performance compared to CCM based compensation. A detailed comparison of these two methods is carried out in Section IV. Furthermore, for a micro grid with multiple DG units, the possible circulating Harmonic current among DG units is an

Abstract The increased penetration of nonlinear loads and power electronics based distributed generation (DG) systems may introduce power quality issues to the distribution power system. However, if controlled and regulated properly, the DG-grid interfacing converters are able to improve the distribution system efficiency and power quality. This paper onus on the distribution system harmonic control through the DG-grid interfacing converters. Two alternative DG systems, current controlled DG and voltage controlled DG, are considered. While most of the previous work on harmonic compensation is based on the current controlled method, a novel harmonic control scheme using voltage controlled method is developed in this paper. The voltage controlled method is more flexible and has similar compensation performance compared to the conventional current controlled method. In addition, by avoiding the implementation of harmonic current tracking loop, the proposed voltage based method can be seamlessly incorporated into a voltage controlled DG unit, which is important to provide direct voltage and frequency support in a micro grid. Moreover, the possible harmonic circulating current among multiple DG systems is also investigated in this paper. Simulations results from a three-phase 5kVA laboratory.

I.

INTRODUCTION

With the increasing concerns on conventional energy cost, energy security and greenhouse gas emissions, the energy industry is experiencing fundamental changes as more distributed energy resource (DER) based distributed generation units are being connected to the grid. These DG systems are seen as a means to facilitate the use of environment friendly renewable energy sources (RES). Most of these DG systems are connected to the grid through power electronic interfacing converters. This increased penetration of DG introduced a number of challenges, such as harmonics, protection interferences, voltage regulation problems, etc. As a result, the power quality as well as power regulation requirements of DG systems are becoming more stringent as have already been reflected in a few grid codes. While the DG interfacing converters may introduce harmonics into the

important issue that has not been sufficiently addressed in the literature yet. This circulating current investigation is also conducted in this paper and is presented in Section V. Finally, the simulation and experimental results are provided in Section VI. Note that although harmonic compensation is the focus of this paper, the proposed control strategy and analysis methods could also be extended to address other voltage quality problems (e.g. voltage flicker and unbalance). II.CCM BASED COMPENSATION Before discussing the proposed VCM based harmonic control scheme, the CCM based harmonic compensation approach is first reviewed in this section. The idea of point of Common coupling (PCC) voltage quality improvement using current controlled gridconnected DG has been reported in , Basically, this method functions by controlling the DG unit as a shunt APF, where the DG unit absorbs harmonic currents of the nonlinear loads, leaving an improved source current and PCC voltage with lower total harmonic distortion (THD). One way to achieve this function is to control each DG as a resistive active power filter (R-APF), where PCC voltage is measured and harmonic components _are extracted to produce the reference harmonic current of a DG (_ /). As a result, the DG unit acts as a small resistance ( ) at harmonic frequencies. To further improve the system performance, a discrete frequency tuned distributed active power filter is proposed .In this novel control strategy, each DG unit works as a frequencyvarying conductance for different harmonic voltages, and the harmonic currents can be properly shared among DG units by using harmonic conductance and volt- ampere (VA) droop control. In this method, when the selected variable conductance is a real number, the DG harmonic current will be in phase with the PCC harmonic voltage and the DG unit behaves like an R-APF (through CCM).

voltage support requirements or load power factor compensation algorithms. If unity power factor injection from a DG is desired, this reactive power command can be simply set to zero. Meanwhile, the harmonic current reference ( ) is produced by the requirement of power quality improvement and available power rating of a DG unit. With the PCC voltage angle information from a phase-locked-loop (PLL), the reference of DG current that is synchronized to the fundamental grid voltage can be obtained. To avoid any conflicts between the compensation of PCC voltage harmonics and the primary function of real power injection of a DG system, the reference harmonic current generation and the current tracking loop need to be designed carefully. Traditionally, the harmonic and fundamental components of the PCC voltage are separated using high pass or low pass filter in either the stationary or synchronous frame . However, this filtering introduces magnitude and phase errors in the extracted signals, which subsequently leads to inaccurate compensation performance. On the other hand, it is important to avoid the high order harmonic tracking due to the limited current control bandwidth (usually, tracking of harmonics higher than 13th order is difficult with an inverter operated at around 10kHz switching frequency). The inaccurate harmonic voltage extraction and current tracking may amplify these high order harmonics, or even lead to system instability. With the above considerations, selected compensation of the most significant low order harmonics in a system (such as the 5th, 7th, and 11th) would be more appropriate. To selectively extract the harmonics, resonant filters are used in . However, the resonant filter has drastic change of phase angle around the resonant frequencies. As a result, even a slight variation of resonant frequencies may introduce substantial phase errors in the extracted signals. As will be discussed later, the phase errors cause circulating harmonic current in a system with multiple DG units. To accurately extract the harmonics, the sliding discrete Fourier transform (SDFT) [17] is used in this work.

The SDFT features very simple structure with a sliding window (with N points) and can be realized easily in a DSP for real time implementation. The z-domain transfer function for the hatch harmonic can be described as:

The block diagram of the power quality improvement method using a current controlled interfacing inverter is shown in Fig. 1. As illustrated, the fundamental reference current ( ) is obtained from the power control loop. The real power reference can be produced using the maximum power point tracking (MPPT) like in a wind or photovoltaic system, the maximum system efficiency control like in a fuel cell system, or the command value from a micro grid energy management center. The reactive power command can be produced from the

Once the harmonic voltage is obtained, the harmonic current reference can then be produced by using the desired harmonic resistance or frequency-varying conductance. Note that the value of and will affect the compensation performance. Generally, smaller gives better compensation performance but tends to reduce the DG system stability. Additionally, the value of should also be determined according to the available rating of a DG unit in order to avoid any conflict with the primary

function

of

power

generation.

The control scheme with consideration of the DGs available rating can be realized through an adaptive control algorithm or by an integral controller subsequently, the DG reference current is obtained by adding the harmonic current reference to the fundamental reference from the power control loop. The multi-loop DG current controller is shown in Fig. 3, where and are the DG reference and feedback currents respectively. To achieve proper fundamental and harmonic current tracking performance, a current controller based on parallel P+Resonant controllers(at the fundamental and harmonic frequencies of interest) can be used where is the system fundamental and harmonic frequency, is the cut-off bandwidth at each frequency,_ is the integral gain at each frequency, and _ is the proportional control gain at all frequencies. To further improve the dynamic response and stability of the control scheme, the inverter side inductor current tracking loop with a proportional controller _ is also added as shown in Fig. 3. Finally, it should be noted that if the feeder impedance (the impedance between PCC and the DG installation point) is small and the DG unit is connected to the grid through an LCL filter (or a coupling transformer), the measured voltage at the installation point can be very close to the PCC voltage. Therefore, remote PCC voltage measurement is not necessary for this compensation.

The equivalent harmonic impedance of DG at the installation point can be derived through simple manipulations as:

III.PROPOSEDVCM BASED COMPENSATION While CCM is mostly employed for grid connected DG inverters, the voltage controlled DG can also be adopted as discussed . If a DG system is to be operated in intentional islanding mode, the voltage control method will produce seamless operation mode transitions and provide necessary voltage and frequency support. To the authors knowledge, active power filtering using the VCM has not been addressed in the literature so far. A. Principle of harmonic compensation The simplified equivalent circuit of a single DGgrid system with VCM, where the DG unit is described as controlled voltage source with an output series Impedance. The grid is represented as a voltage Source and the grid impedance. The PCC nonlinear load is shown in the middle as a harmonic current source and passive loads. If DG harmonic voltage is controlled by using the PCC harmonic voltage as:

where is the DG harmonic current and is the DG harmonic impedance. This equivalent impedance at harmonic frequencies is also shown in the left side From the above analysis, it is obvious that by properly controlling the DG harmonic voltage with a positive feedback gain of G, the DG harmonic impedance will be scaled down by a factor of (1+G). Therefore, the harmonic impedance at DG side can be substantially lower than that at the grid side. As a result, most of the nonlinear load current will be absorbed by the DG, leaving an improved grid current and PCC voltage. Obviously, a higher G value will further reduce the PCC voltage harmonics. With G=0, the system will be a standard voltage controlled DG unit without any active compensation. The harmonic current can be shared automatically according to the DG side and grid side harmonic impedances. This is in contrast to the current controlled method, where the DG current will be sinusoidal if the active power filtering function is not enabled. frequencies. As a result, the PCC harmonic voltage will be amplified compared to the conventional Vf droop control. Indeed, if DG harmonic current can be properly attenuated with a negative G, the performance will be the same as the conventional current controlled DG. Therefore, with different compensation requirements or DG operation objectives, the value of G can be controlled adaptively (with a theoretical range from -1 to ). Since a high value of G tends to have over modulation problems and makes the system unstable, a practical top limit of G should be selected carefully. Finally, it is important to note that G should not be less than -1, as this will introduce capacitive equivalent impedance, which may induce some system resonance. In this work, G>0 is named as harmonic compensation mode, G=0 is named as uncontrolled mode, and G<0 is defined as harmonic rejection mode. The proposed control strategy is implemented similarly; a SDFT block first separates the fundamental and harmonic components of the PCC voltage. The fundamental voltage is used for grid voltage synchronization and DG fundamental real and reactive

power calculation, while the harmonic components are used for the inverter reference harmonic voltage generation. In the control scheme, the real and reactive power control block produces the fundamental reference of DG voltage while the active harmonic control block generates the reference harmonic voltages. The mechanism of active harmonic control is illustrated in As discussed before, this control block can operate at compensation, rejection or uncontrolled mode. To avoid overrating operation and possible conflict with the primary function of real power control, a control algorithm named compensation gain adjustment is added. By using either the adaptive controller or a simple integral controller this algorithm adjusts the value of K, which subsequently changes the effective gain for each harmonic. To achieve optimal compensation, the feedback gains for each harmonic voltage are not necessarily to be the same. Generally, lower for high order harmonics. SIMULATION RESULTS

A. PCC Harmonic Control (Simulation) 1) Current Control Method The current controlled interfacing inverter is first tested in simulation with the 5th and 7th harmonic compensated. shows the performance of the current controlled DG without PCC voltage harmonic compensation. As can be seen in this figure, the DG current has very little harmonic current and the nonlinear load current is supplied by the grid. As a result, thePCC voltage is distorted due to the harmonic voltage drop on the grid impedance.The situation with PCC voltage harmonic compensation . As expected, by acting as a low resistance at the selected harmonic frequencies, the DG unit absorbs most of the nonlinear load currents, leading to an improved PCC voltage and grid current According to the harmonic analysis in the THD of PCC voltage is 10.25% without harmonic compensation, and the harmonic distortion is reduced to 2.50% by applying the current controlled harmonic compensation method 2) Voltage Control Method The voltage controlled DG and different operation modes are also tested in the simulation, and the results are shown in Figs. Shows the results without any harmonic compensation where the DG unit is controlled with pure sinusoidal voltage . In this case, the DG and grid share the nonlinear load current as can be seen . Consequently, the PCC voltage is distorted due to the nonlinear currents through the grid impedance. To improve the PCC voltage, harmonic compensation is implemented . As the DG impedance at harmonic frequencies is reduced by a factor of the DG unit absorbs most of the load nonlinear currents as can be seen. As a result, the grid current and PCC voltage are improved. Finally, the harmonic rejection mode is tested and the results are presented impedance at harmonic frequencies. In this case, the grid provides all nonlinear load current, and therefore the grid current and voltage are further distorted compared to the harmonic uncontrolled mode The associated harmonic analysis of PCC voltages under different operation modes are provided As shown, the PCC voltage has almost 6% 5th harmonic voltage and the THD is 6.72% when the conventional voltage control method is adopted. On the other hand, when harmonic compensation control is adopted, the 5th harmonic voltage at PCC is reduced to around 1.5% and the THD is reduced to 2.43%. Finally, the harmonic rejection mode introduces a further polluted PCC voltage with a THD of 10.08%. B. Circulating Current (Simulation) To study the circulating harmonic current caused by the harmonic extraction phase error, the equivalent model presented in Fig. 10 is adopted. In this model, the grid side impedance is reduced to 0.3 and 2mH to emulate the effects of multiple inverters. In this simulation, the VCM is adopted, and the harmonic control feedback gains of the 5th and 7th harmonics are selected as 2.9. Therefore,

The proposed harmonic control strategies are verified through Matlab/Simulink and experimentally on a 5kVA grid connected DG system. Both CCM and VCM are implemented for harmonic compensation. In both the simulation and the experiment, the nonlinear load at PCC is a three-phase diode rectifier with parallel connected capacitor (1000uF) and resistor (25) at the DC side. To be consistent with the case study in Section V, the circulating current investigation is based on an equivalent grid with lower impedance (to model the effects of multiple voltage controlled DG units). The system parameters used in the simulation and experiments are almost identical and are listed in Table 1.

the DG equivalent impedance is very close to the grid equivalent impedance. At first, when the PCC harmonic voltage is extracted without phase error using the SDFT method, the simulation results are provided. The harmonic analysis of PCC voltage and DG current respectively. Note that due to the lower harmonic control gain (G) used here, the 5th harmonic compensation is not as good as before. On the other hand, when a 90 degree phase delay is intentionally added to the PCC harmonic voltage detection, the simulated results are shown in fig. The associated harmonic spectra of the PCC voltage and DG current are also shown in Figs.21 and 22 for comparison. As illustrated, the DG current THD increases from 117.98% to 144.07% when a phase delay is added to the 5th and 7th harmonic extractions. Considering that the fundamental current is unchanged (due to the unchanged real and reactive power reference), the increase of DG current THD is caused by the circulating 5th and 7th harmonic current between the DG and grid. At the same time, the THD of PCC voltage increases from 5.41% to 7.74%. This implies that if the same PCC voltage THD compensation performance is required, the DGs 5th and 7th harmonic currents and the circulating harmonic current will further increase. Simulation Output:

P cv c
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