IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 4, NO.
2, JUNE 2013
Direct Single-Loop -Synthesis Voltage Control for
Suppression of Multiple Resonances in Microgrids
with Power-Factor Correction Capacitors
Alireza Kahrobaeian and Yasser Abdel-Rady I. Mohamed, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—This paper presents a robust single-loop direct voltage
control strategy featuring effective suppression of uncertain reso-
nant modes generated due power-factor correction (PFC) capaci-
tors and residential capacitive loads in distributed generation (DG)
microgrids. The proposed controller adopts an improved uncer-
tainty modeling approach, which facilities the realization of a ro-
bust controller based on structured singular values analysis.
The resultant controller is used as a direct voltage controller where
no additional damping technique, either passive or active, is re-
quired. This feature reduces the sensor requirements in the DG
interface controller and enhances the bandwidth characteristics
of the closed-loop voltage-controlled converter. Mathematical and
comparative analyses are provided to show the advantages of pro-
posed -synthesis controller over the conventional controller
in maintaining robust stability as well as robust performance of
the microgrid in presence of parameter uncertainties and uncer-
tain resonant peaks caused by connection of PFC capacitors. Sys-
tematic design approach for the proposed controller is presented.
Time-domain simulation studies and comparative experimental re-
sults are presented to show the effectiveness and robustness of the
proposed controller in microgrid applications.
Index Terms—Distributed generation, interaction dynamics, mi-
crogrids, resonance damping, voltage control.
I. INTRODUCTION
E FFECTIVE utilization and integration of distributed gen-
eration (DG) microgrids has become a major driving force
in realizing the vision of clean and sustainable energy supply in
the near future. The use of DG microgrids as building blocks of
large active distribution systems has the potential to increase
the service reliability and reduce the need for future genera-
tion expansion or grid reinforcement. Moreover, it extends up
the possibility of making the DG responsible for local power
quality in a way that is not possible with conventional central-
ized generators [1]–[4]. However, robust operation of DG units
in microgrids can be a challenging objective when different
types of loads and power system devices are connected in the
vicinity of a DG unit. Power factor correction (PFC) capacitors
are widely used in power distribution systems to improve their
efficiency and power quality. PFC capacitors are mainly used in
customer’s side to avoid utility power factor penalties. Reactive
power compensation results in reduced losses in transmission
Manuscript received January 08, 2012; revised June 26, 2012 and September
04, 2012; accepted October 31, 2012. Date of publication April 09, 2013; date
of current version May 18, 2013. Paper no. TSG-00008-2012.
The authors are with Department of Electrical and Computer Engi-
neering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G-2V4 Canada (e-mail:
kahrobae@ualberta.ca; yasser_rady@ieee.org).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TSG.2012.2228014
1949-3053/$31.00 © 2013 IEEE
1151
lines as well as transformer heating. Moreover, in long distri-
bution lines, they are often used in order to increase the supply
voltage at the load side. However, switching of PFC capacitors
within a microgrid can cause performance degradation and even
system instability [5]–[8]. This is due to 1) PFC capacitors af-
fect the effective value of the capacitor filter of DG units; and
2) PFC capacitors induce multiple uncertain resonant dynamics
reflected to DG units. On the other hand, capacitive loads (e.g.,
residential capacitive loads) might generate uncertain resonant
modes reflected to DG converter control dynamics [9]. Accord-
ingly, PFC capacitors and capacitive loads in DG microgrids di-
rectly affect the closed loop voltage control stability and might
yield high resonant voltage and current disturbances.
Several hierarchical control strategies have been reported for
DG units in grid connected and autonomous microgrid modes
[1]–[4]. However, these methods do not incorporate the effects
of filter parameter variations and the system uncertainties along
with the effect connection of PFC capacitor banks in the vicinity
of DG units.
One of the well-established robust control approaches that is
reported in many converter-based applications is control
[2], [10]–[12]. A conventional multi-loop control scheme com-
posed of a robust outer voltage controller is proposed in
[8] to increase microgrid robustness against effective filter ca-
pacitance variations in presence of PFC capacitors. However,
only uncertainty in the effective filter capacitance is consid-
ered. Further, the uncertainty over the effective filter capaci-
tance caused by connection of PFC capacitor has been mod-
eled as a lumped unstructured uncertainty. This is usually ob-
tained by comparing the nominal open loop transfer function
and the transfer function with the worst case filter capacitor
variations. The proposed controller succeeds in maintaining the
system stability in presence of PFC capacitors; however, the ro-
bust performance of the system is compromised due to the in-
herent conservative nature of a robust controller synthe-
sized for unstructured uncertainties [13], [14]. Therefore, pos-
sible instabilities can be yielded under parameter variation; and
the voltage quality is highly affected as the PFC capacitor is
connected. It should be noted that this limitation is inherently
related to the fundamental concept behind the control ap-
proach, which is optimum loop shaping under unstructured un-
certainty model. Unstructured uncertainty modeling can be used
in large control systems, where there is a difficulty in modeling
uncertainties in each subsystem. For converter-based DG units,
the system order is generally low. Therefore, the conservative
unstructured uncertainty assumption is not really needed in such
applications. On the other hand, conventional control is ap-
plied with inductor current feedback control and inner capacitor
current loop to damp the resonant peak of the ac-side filter [8];
1152 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 4, NO. 2, JUNE 2013

without damping the filter resonance peak, the perturbed closed

loop system cannot remain stable with conventional con-
trol. However, in microgrid applications, it has been shown re-
cently that direct voltage control enables simpler implementa-
tion and more importantly, high bandwidth voltage control per-
formance, which helps in realizing seamless transfer between
grid connected and autonomous microgrids [15].
Motivated by the aforementioned limitations, this paper
presents a detailed modeling approach and a single-loop direct
voltage control scheme based on the robust structured singular
values -synthesis control approach. Unlike the augmented
unstructured uncertainty modeling approach used with con-
ventional control, unstructured uncertainty modeling is
adopted to enable the realization of a less conservative robust
-synthesis [13], [14] controller. The resultant controller is
used as a direct voltage controller where no additional damping
technique, either passive or active, is required. Mathematical Fig. 1. Microgrid study system.
and comparative analysis are provided to show the advantages
of proposed -synthesis approach over the conventional namics. In fact, these disturbances model the interactions be-
controller in maintaining robust stability as well as robust tween the DG interface and the rest of the microgrid system.
performance of the microgrids in presence of parameter uncer- Therefore, a robust control design with effective disturbance re-
tainties and uncertain resonant peaks caused by PFC capacitors jection can minimize such disturbances, which might lead to un-
connection. Systematic design approach for the proposed con- certain resonant modes and interaction dynamics.
troller is presented. The performance of the proposed controller In autonomous microgrid operation, the following droops
in mitigating uncertain resonant modes in distributed genera- over the fundamental output voltage frequency and magnitude
tion microgrids is investigated by simulation and experimental are often used to provide power sharing functions in the control
results. scheme:
The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. System
configuration is presented in Section II. The proposed control (2)
scheme is presented in Section III. Simulation and experimental (3)
results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the pro-
posed control scheme in Sections IV and V, respectively. Con- where and are the nominal frequency and voltage set-
clusions are drawn in Section VI. points and the average active and reactive powers, and ,
are respectively used to allow sufficient time-scale separation
between the outer power and inner voltage control loops.
II. SYSTEM CONFIGURATION AND MODELING The average active and reactive powers corresponding to the
Fig. 1 shows the single-line diagram of the microgrid study fundamental components are obtained by means of a low-pass
system, which is adapted from the IEEE 399 standard for filter (LPF) as follows:
low voltage applications [16]. A typical microgrid system can (4)
operate either in grid-connected or islanded mode depending
whether the switch SW is closed or open. In grid connected (5)
mode, the demanded power is supplied by both the utility and
DG units. However once being disconnected from the utility, The static droop gains and in (2), (3) can be calculated for
DG units are supposed to supply the total connected load with a given range of frequency and voltage magnitude as follows:
high power quality and minimum interaction dynamics between
power converters and other microgrid entities. (6)
In the stationary reference frame, the power-circuit dy-
namics of the -filtered DG unit can be represented by the (7)
following model:
The set points in (1), (2) act as a virtual communication agent for
different inverters for autonomous operation. Also, the -com-
ponent of the output voltage is used in (6); as per the voltage-ori-
ented control, the reference of the output voltage magnitude is
(1) aligned with the -axis of the inverter reference frame.
The static droop gains can be selected to achieve correct
power-sharing performance under different unit ratings ac-
where and represent the resistance and inductance of the
cording to
inverter-side filter inductor; is the filter capacitance; is the
voltage at the point of common coupling, is the injected (8)
line-current; and is the inverter output voltage. It can be
noted that the model in (1) assumes two sets of dynamic dis- where is the rated apparent power, and subscripts denote
turbance and imposed on the capacitor voltage dy- two microgrid-connected units.
KAHROBAEIAN AND MOHAMED: DIRECT SINGLE-LOOP -SYNTHESIS VOLTAGE CONTROL 1153

Fig. 2. The effect of PFC capacitor on the open loop system dynamics.

The voltage reference provided by the droop controller is

applied to the voltage controller, regulates the inverter output
voltage. However, the relative stability of the medium-fre-
quency modes, associated with the voltage control dynamics
[11], [12], is mainly affected by the interaction dynamics
between filter parameters and other microgrid entities. Note
that interaction dynamics at these modes can be yielded due to
possible mode excitation by microgrid low-order harmonics.
PFC capacitor banks can affect those medium-frequency
modes, yielding to microgrid instability and performance
degradation. The sample DG unit shown in Fig. 1 (DG1) is
connected to the main feeder through an LC filter and the
line impedance (line1), supplying common loads connected
to the feeder. The connected loads can be linear RL type,
nonlinear rectifier type or motors accompanied with PFC ca-
pacitor banks to increase the total load power factor. However,
PFC capacitors would increase the effective voltage-source
inverter (VSI) filter capacitance, changing the LC filter cut-off
frequency and subsequently affecting the stability of the VSI Fig. 3. The effect of adding PFC capacitor on the system open-loop frequency
controller. Moreover, the additional capacitor located after response (a) without active damping (b) with active damping
the line impedance, introduces new resonance frequencies .
which can cause resonant excitations once a disturbance near
those resonances occur. Fig. 2 demonstrates the effect of PFC resonance transfer functions with and without the PFC capac-
capacitor-connection on the open loop system as part of the itor. As shown in Fig. 3(a), connecting PFC capacitor, not only
interaction dynamics between the DG unit and the rest of the causes the original resonance peak associated with the LC filter
microgrid. Note that in the model of Fig. 2, , and to drift, but also a new resonant frequency is formed which can
are all considered as external disturbances modeling the affect system stability and performance in case of harmonic
interactions between a DG unit and the network. When the PFC excitations. Multiple uncertain resonances can be easily created
capacitor is not connected, the open-loop transfer function can under different values of the PFC capacitor (e.g., switched
be obtained as in (9). When the PFC capacitor is connected, capacitors).
the new open-loop transfer function from the inverter voltage Active damping is a well-established method in order to sta-
to the bus voltage can be obtained by (10). Note bilize the open loop system before designing the controller. As
that the inner capacitor current feedback loop, with gain , shown by the solid-curve in Fig. 3(b), when the PFC capacitor
is also considered in Fig. 2 in order to account for the active is not connected, applying current feedback from the filter ca-
damping feature. (See the equation at the bottom of the page.) pacitor current effectively damps the resonance peak of the LC
Considering the system parameters presented in Appendix, filter. However, since there is no access to the current going
Fig. 3(a) compares the frequency response of the open loop through the PFC capacitor, , the resonance peaks caused

(9)

(10)
1154 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 4, NO. 2, JUNE 2013

Fig. 5. Standard configuration with analysis.

Fig. 4. LFT representation of closed-loop system. Ignoring the effect of perturbation block, [13] suggests that the
nominal performance is achieved when . Note that
by its connection cannot be fully mitigated; and therefore, af- and stands for the singular value.
fecting system stability and performance. As shown in Fig. 3(b), The robust stability of the closed loop system can be studied
this effect gets even more obvious as the capacitor value in- based on Theorem 1.
creases, which increases the low-frequency resonance peak. The Theorem 1: Let be stable, for all , the
uncertain low-frequency resonant mode matches the bandwidth perturbed system of Fig. 5 is robustly stable if
of low-order harmonics; therefore harmonic excitation and har- Although adopting the optimization approach, based
monic instabilities can easily occur even if the converter-side on singular values minimization, provides stable operation of
LC filter resonance is damped. the perturbed system based on Theorem 1, lack of information
Fig. 3 implies that the system stability and performance on the structure of leads to conservative solutions in many
can be affected by the uncertainties imposed on the open loop practical problems where the uncertainty consist of multiple
by connecting the PFC capacitor even when active damping norm-bounded perturbations. In this case, the performance of
methods are used. This motivates the necessity of designing a the closed-loop perturbed system maybe degraded [13].
robust voltage control strategy that maintains system stability
and provides acceptable performance in a reasonably wide B. Robust Control of Systems With Structured Uncertainty
range of parameter variations that might be imposed by the
un-modeled dynamics of the rest of the microgrid. According to [13], having more knowledge on the uncer-
tainty structure provides less conservative solutions on “struc-
tured singular values analysis. Using -analysis, not only
III. ROBUST CONTROL can provide robust stability but also the system performance
under uncertainties will improve. Once again consider the
A. Robust Control of Systems With Unstructured Uncertainty configuration shown in Fig. 4, the structure of the uncertainty
Any linear interconnection of inputs, outputs, system pertur- block, , is assumed to be known as in (13).
bations and the controller can be rearranged to match the closed- (13)
loop format represented in Fig. 4 using linear fractional trans-
formation (LFT), where is the open-loop transfer function, where with is the dimension of the block .
is the controller and is the unstructured uncertainty Definition 1: When is an interconnected transfer matrix
block. The term unstructured refers to the fact that is assumed as in Fig. 4, the structured singular value with respect to is
to be bounded but otherwise unknown. defined by (14):
The controller can be considered of a system component itself
and therefor the standard configuration may be obtained (14)
using the lower LFT of and as presented in (11).
(11) where is the smallest singular value of (i.e., )
that makes .
The variables , , , and , in Fig. 4 are vector signals, The above definition indicates a frequency dependant sta-
where denotes the exogenous input including reference com- bility margin [13], [14]. The robust stability result with regard
mand and any possible disturbances; denotes the error output; to structured uncertainties is given in Theorem 2.
and are the input and output signals of the uncertainty block. Theorem 2: Let be stable, and , the per-
Based on the 2-input, 2-output structure of Fig. 4, (12) can be turbed system of Fig. 4 is robustly stable with respect to , if
concluded as the input output relationship. The stabilizing con- and only if .
troller should be designed in a way that not only the opti- Theorem 2 gives a sufficient and necessary condition for ro-
mized performance of the nominal plant is achieved with re- bust stabilization. It can be shown that it gives a less conserva-
spect to minimizing the effect of the exogenous input, , over tive stabilization measure as compared to norm minimiza-
output , but also the closed loop system remains stable for all tion. This can be shown by
possible plant uncertainties of . (15)

(12) where the equality only holds when is unstructured. There-

fore, in case of structured uncertainties, (15) clearly shows that
norm optimization approach leads to more conservative
KAHROBAEIAN AND MOHAMED: DIRECT SINGLE-LOOP -SYNTHESIS VOLTAGE CONTROL 1155

controllers as compared to the controller designed based on min-

imizing structured singular values (i.e., ).
In addition to robust stability, it is desired that the designed
control system can maintain a satisfactory performance level
even in presence of plant dynamic uncertainties and distur-
bances. Using -analysis provides a measure to analyze the
performance of the closed loop system with the perturbations
occurring. The robust performance requirement can be set as
(16) for all [13], [14].

(16)
Reference [13] suggests that a fictitious performance block of
can be assumed as shown in Fig. 5, with appropriate di-
mensions and . Therefore, based on Fig. 5, the robust Fig. 6. Schematic of the closed-loop system with conventional Controller.
performance condition of (16) can be equivalently considered as
a robust stabilization problem with the uncertainty block to be
replaced by where

(17)

This is turns out to be a stabilization problem with respect to the

structured uncertainty of , thus yielding to (18)

(18)

C. and -Synthesis Voltage Controller Design

Fig. 7. Closed loop configuration for robust stability analysis.
Mixed sensitivity robust design approach along with
inner current feedback loop is used in [8] in order to maintain
the stability of the microgrid when PFC capacitor bank is where is the robust controller to be designed from solving
added. Following the conventional approach, uncertainty in the mixed-sensitivity optimization problem of minimizing
the effective filter capacitance is assumed to be unstructured norm of the closed loop system transfer matrix from to .
and therefore it is modeled as a single lumped 1 1 full block Considering the design parameters provided in Appendix and
matrix of defined by (19) where stands for the singular by following the provided design approach, is given
value and and are the nominal and perturbed transfer in (23). Note that current feedback from the filter capacitor is
functions, respectively. adopted in order to damp the LC resonant peak.

(19)

(20)
(23)
Fig. 6 shows the standard configuration adopted for con- Although adopting optimization approach, based on sin-
troller design. is the plant unstructured uncertainty and gular values minimization, provides stable operation of the
the weighting function is determined from the worst case system in presence of the unstructured uncertainties, it leads to
and is selected to lie above to normalize the uncer- conservative solutions where the performance of the perturbed
tainty block (i.e., ). and are the weighting system is degraded and therefore it fails to meet the robust
functions, penalizing the tracking error and controller effort re- performance criteria [13], [14]. Therefore, this paper adopts a
spectively and are suggested to be in form of (21) and (22). more detailed model of the system uncertainties which provides
The resonant mode in (21) provides internal model dynamics at further knowledge on the structure of the uncertainties. This
the fundamental frequency to achieve zero steady-state tracking makes it possible to use the -synthesis approach in order
error when the controller is implemented in the stationary ref- to achieve a less conservative robust voltage controller for
erence-frame. microgrid applications.
Fig. 8 shows the schematic of the closed-loop system with
(21) the -synthesis controller, where instead of using lumped un-
structured uncertainty block, the uncertainties over the effective
(22) filter capacitor caused by the addition of as well as the
possible filter inductance variations are modeled individually
Using the schematic provided in Fig. 6 and introducing design using multiplicative perturbation method. are the
weighting functions, the weighted closed loop system can be weightings used to normalize the uncertainty blocks assuming
recast in the standard configuration as shown in Fig. 7 varying up to 5 times its nominal value and 10% deviation
1156 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 4, NO. 2, JUNE 2013

Fig. 8. Schematic of the closed-loop system with -synthesis controller.

on . and are assumed to have the same form as (21)

and (22), respectively.
The schematic of Fig. 8 can be again rearranged in the stan-
dard configuration of Fig. 7. Note that, more information
on the structure of the uncertainty block is available by adopting
the suggested approach. The structure of is provided in (24). Fig. 9. Robust stability analysis of without damping (solid) and with
damping (dashed).
(24)

In this paper, the D-K iteration method provided by Matlab ro-

bust control toolbox [17] is adopted to compute the controller.
Based on the weighted open-loop schemes provided in
Fig. 8 and using the design parameters provided in Appendix,
the -synthesis controller is designed. Note that the
proposed controller which is based on structured singular anal-
ysis provides a direct voltage control solution where no inner
current control is needed for plant stabilization purposes. The
controller obtained with this method has high order; therefore
the Hankel-norm model reduction method is applied to reduce
its order to 6 as shown in (25). In spite of the higher controller
order, the proposed controller doesn’t adopt an inductor-current
feedback control and doesn’t need a capacitor current feed-
back control for active damping; therefore, it leads to easier
design, implementation and also higher controller bandwidth
as compared to the conventional multi-loop controller.
Further, the sensor requirements are less, as only the output
voltage is used for feedback. To limit the converter current Fig. 10. Nominal performance (dashed) and robust performance (solid) anal-
during fault conditions, the inductor current is monitored and ysis with control.
used to generate a proportional signal to block the pulse-width
modulator, which in turns limits the fault current of the con- With inner active damping loop, the nominal and robust per-
verter. This protection feature however does not compromise formance of the closed-loop system with are shown in
the advantages of the direct voltage control. Fig. 10. It can be seen that when there are no perturbations,
the closed-loop system achieves nominal performance
, however, it fails to satisfy the robust performance criterion
(25) which is required to yield satisfactory performance level even
in presence of plant dynamic uncertainties.
The robust stability and performance measures for the closed
loop system with are shown in Figs. 11 and 12, respectively.
The robust stability of the system is inferred from Fig. 11 where
the frequency response of is less than 1 over the whole
IV. COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS
frequency range. Note that this is achieved without adopting
Fig. 9 shows the robust stability measure when the con- any inner inductor or capacitor current loop, which indicates
troller is adopted with active damping loop. Having enough the robust and inherent damping characteristics of the proposed
damping of the LC filter resonance mode is crucial in this case. -synthesis direct voltage controller. In order to show the dif-
Fig. 9 implies that without the inner capacitor-current control ference between the structured and unstructured modeling of the
loop, the system stability is not guaranteed in presence of ca- uncertainties, in the same plot, the maximum singular value of
pacitive uncertainties and therefore, direct voltage control using the leading 2 2 transfer matrix, , is shown, which
robust design fails. characterizes the robust stability with respect to unstructured
KAHROBAEIAN AND MOHAMED: DIRECT SINGLE-LOOP -SYNTHESIS VOLTAGE CONTROL
Fig. 11. Robust stability analysis of direct voltage control with structured
(solid) and unstructured (dashed) uncertainty.
Fig. 12. Nominal performance (dashed) and robust performance (solid) anal-
ysis of proposed controller.
perturbations. It is seen that the latter is greater than 1 over some
frequencies. This means that the robust stability is not preserved
if the uncertainty is unstructured. This confirms that if further in-
formation is known about uncertainty structure, structured sin-
gular values gives less conservative results as compared to the
conventional approach where the uncertainties are lumped to-
gether as an unstructured matrix of .
Fig. 12 reveals that both nominal and robust performance
measures are less than 1 when is applied. This implies that
not only the system remains stable in presence of high uncer-
tainties caused by the addition of the PFC capacitor, but also
the -based controller would provide satisfactory tracking and
disturbance rejection performances in this case.
Fig. 9–Fig. 12 imply that although the controller can
maintain the stability of the closed loop system in presence of
PFC capacitor it yields a limited uncertainty rejection range, and
fails to maintain a satisfactory level of performance within the
robustness range. Moreover, adopting this controller requires
1157
Fig. 13. Dominant modes of the closed-loop resonant transfer function with
and when is increased.
applying active damping method. Even then, as was illustrated
in Fig. 2, applying filter capacitor current feedback cannot fully
compensate the resonance effect caused by connecting the PFC
capacitors. The -synthesis controller, on the other hand, can
provide both robust stability and performance without any need
for the inner current feedback (damping).
In order to have a better appreciation of the range of the un-
certainty that the system remains stable in and also in order to
compare the relative stability of the closed loop poles, the char-
acteristic equation of the closed loop system is derived in (26),
where is the voltage controller transfer function. (See the
equation at the bottom of the page.) Considering the system pa-
rameters presented in Appendix, Fig. 13 shows how the closed
loop dominant poles change when the PFC capacitor increases
when and controllers are used. The locations of the
poles suggest that provides more damping yielding to better
performance under the occurrence of uncertainties. It should be
noted that is designed to yield best performance available.
Performance limitation is inherently associated with unstruc-
tured uncertainty construction associated with the control
approach.
V. SIMULATION RESULTS
To evaluate the performance of the proposed control scheme
under the operation of a microgrid system, the study system
shown in Fig. 1 is implemented for time-domain simulation
under Matlab/Simulink environment. The nominal circuit pa-
rameters are given in Appendix. First, the effect of the common
inductive load at the main feeder is studied; the local load and
also the nonlinear load are assumed to be disconnected. A three
phase capacitor bank is used to provide 17.3 kVAr in order
to compensate for the low power factor of the supplied load.
This would increase the load power factor from 0.85 lagging
to 1.0. In order to have better appreciation of the proposed di-
rect controller, its performance is compared to the conventional
(26)
1158
Fig. 14. (a) Active and reactive power responses of the microgrid setup
(b) Output voltage of DG1 when PFC capacitor is added with dual loop
control. (c) Output voltage of DG1 when PFC capacitor is added with
conventional PI dual-loop control with feed-forward. (d) Output voltage of
DG1 when PFC capacitor is added with proposed direct voltage -control.
dual loop decoupled PI controller with feed-forward adopted in
[19] as well as the robust conventional control with active
damping.
Fig. 14(a) shows how each DG unit is supplying active and
reactive power via droop control to meet the load demand be-
fore and after the connection of the PFC. Fig. 14(b) shows the
output voltage of DG1 when the PFC capacitor bank is con-
nected at with the conventional robust dual-loop
controller applied (the output voltage of the second DG shows
similar performance). Due to weak robust stability of the con-
ventional controller, the disturbance rejection performance
is very poor as shown in Fig. 14(b). Fig. 14(c)–(d) shows the
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 4, NO. 2, JUNE 2013
performance of the system when the dual-loop conventional de-
coupled PI controller with feed-forward [19] and the single-loop
direct-voltage -controller are adopted; respectively. The per-
formance comparison reveals that adopting the proposed direct
voltage -controller not only can maintain the system stability
without any inner control loop (i.e., active damping); but also
yields a control performance better than that of the conventional
dual-loop decoupled controller with feed-forward in terms of
less voltage oscillation and higher quality of the output voltage.
In order to investigate the performance of the proposed con-
troller under the presence of local disturbances, the capacitive
RLC-type local load (residential capacitive load) shown in
Fig. 1 is connected to DG1 at whereas the inductive
RL-load and the PFC capacitor bank are both connected to
the main feeder. Fig. 15(a) shows how the demanded active
and reactive powers are divided between the two DG units.
Because of the capacitive nature of the connected load, the
total net reactive power generated by DG unit is negative and
it is mainly affecting DG1 due to load proximity to DG1.
Fig. 15(b), (c), (d) demonstrate the output voltage of DG1 at the
point of common coupling when the conventional robust
dual-loop control scheme, conventional PI controller and the
proposed direct voltage -controller are adopted, respectively.
The proposed controller yields the best performance in terms
of the robust stability and voltage quality.
Having a well-designed voltage controller enables the DG
unit to contribute to the voltage reliability at the point of
common coupling. To test the robustness of the designed con-
trol schemes in rejecting unbalanced voltage disturbances, an
unbalance fault-ride through scenario is simulated at .
Figs. 16 and 17 show the instantaneous voltage and load current
with dual loop and direct voltage -control, respectively
when the unbalanced load is added. Both controllers succeed
in maintaining robust stable voltage operation at the point of
common coupling. However, as can be seen, even though no
active damping/inner current loop is applied, the proposed
direct voltage -controller gives robust and high-quality
voltage control performance as compared to the conventional
multi-loop controller.
Fig. 18 shows the performance of DG1 when the nonlinear
load is switched on at under different control
structures. Note that the connection of the nonlinear-rectifier
load introduces different harmonic distortions which in turn
can excite different resonance modes in presence of the PFC
capacitor. Therefore, this scenario can be considered as a useful
measure to test the performance of the proposed controller in
rejecting unknown harmonic disturbances. Fig. 18(a) shows the
output voltage when the conventional PI dual-loop controller
with feed-forward is adopted. As can be see, although the
system remains stable, the voltage quality is highly degraded
. Fig. 18(b) implies that adopting the dual-loop
voltage controller can also help maintaining system sta-
bility and in despite of slight improvement in voltage quality,
the voltage THD is still very high . However,
the best voltage quality in presence of nonlinear load can be
achieved with the proposed direct voltage -controller as shown
in Fig. 18(c). The voltage THD in this case is 0.33% and 5.7%
prior and after connecting the nonlinear load, respectively.
It should be noted that the proposed contoller is tested without
internal model dynamics at harmonic frequenices to gauge the
robustness of both controller under harmonic disturbances. The
KAHROBAEIAN AND MOHAMED: DIRECT SINGLE-LOOP -SYNTHESIS VOLTAGE CONTROL
Fig. 15. (a) Active and Reactive power responses of the microgrid setup when
capacitive local load is added. (b) DG1 output voltage with dual loop
control (c) DG1 output voltage with conventional PI dual-loop control with
feed-forward (d) DG1 output voltage with proposed direct voltage -control.
THD in the output voltage can be further reduced by embedding
internal model dynamics in voltage control structure. This can
be achieved by including the following resonant dynamics at
harmonic frequencies:
where is the fundamental angular frequency, is constant,
are damping coefficient, and is the harmonic order.
VI. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
To validate the effectiveness of the proposed control system,
a laboratory-scale microgrid system, shown in Fig. 19, is
used. A semi-stack IGBT voltage-source converter is used to
interface a DG unit to the microgrid system. The dSpace1104
control system is used to implement the proposed control
scheme in real-time. The pulse-width modulation algorithm
is implemented on the slave-processor (TMS320F240-DSP)
1159
Fig. 16. Dynamic response of the system under unbalanced condition with di-
rect voltage -control being adopted: Instantaneous load current (a). Output DG
voltage (b).
Fig. 17. Dynamic response of the system under unbalanced condition with dual
loop control adopted: (a) Instantaneous load current. (b) Output DG voltage
(b).
of the dSPACE controller. The sampling/switching frequency
is 10 kHz, which indicates that the proposed control scheme
(voltage and angle controllers) is computationally efficient and
can be effectively implemented under high sampling frequency.
The current and voltage sensors used are HASS 50-S and LEM
V 25-400, respectively. The LC ac-side filter parameters are
and . The performance of the proposed
control scheme is tested under different load conditions. For
the sake of performance comparison, the robustness of the
proposed -controller is compared to the control when
sudden filter capacitor increase is adopted.
Fig. 20 shows the power and voltage responses when the mi-
crogrid load is connected. As can be seen the voltage dip re-
covers swiftly
The detailed voltage waveform at the instance of the load
connection is also shown in Fig. 20(c) verifying the capa-
bility of the proposed method in rejecting load disturbances.
Fig. 21(a) shows the output voltage control performance under
highly nonlinear load. The voltage quality is slightly degraded
under heavily nonlinear load conditions (3-phase full-wave
bridge rectifier with highly-inductive dc-side load). However,
the THD in the output voltage is around 5%, which is below
the standard limits [18].
In order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed -con-
troller, in maintaining stable operation of DG units in presence
1160
Fig. 18. DG1 output voltage when the nonlinear load is connected (a) with con-
ventional dual-loop control with feed forward (b) with dual-loop control
(c) with proposed direct voltage -control.
Fig. 19. A view of the laboratory setup.
of highly capacitive loads and PFC capacitor banks, the nom-
inal filter capacitor value is increased by 500% and the response
of the proposed method is presented through Fig. 22. As can
be seen, the -controller is well capable of maintaining system
stability by effectively damping the resonance mode changes
caused by the filter capacitor increase. On the other hand, how-
ever, without active damping, the controller is incapable of
maintaining the system stability. Fig. 23 shows unstable system
operation due to lack of effective damping when controller
is adopted without inner active damping loop.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON SMART GRID, VOL. 4, NO. 2, JUNE 2013
Fig. 20. Control performance with proposed -control. (a) Power response.
(b) Phase-a voltage response. (c) Detailed waveform.
Fig. 21. Voltage response with the proposed controller under highly nonlinear
load. (a) Voltage waveform. (b) Load current.
Fig. 22. System voltage response to a 500% increase in output filter capacitor
when the proposed -controller is adopted.
VII. CONCLUSION
This paper has presented a robust single-loop direct voltage
control strategy featuring effective suppression of uncertain res-
onant modes generated due PFC capacitors and residential ca-
pacitive loads in DG microgrids. An improved uncertainty mod-
KAHROBAEIAN AND MOHAMED: DIRECT SINGLE-LOOP -SYNTHESIS VOLTAGE CONTROL 1161

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verter control parameters are given as follows:
DG1: 42 kVA, 480 V(L-L), 60 Hz, , Alireza Kahrobaeian received the B.Sc. and M.Sc.
, , , , degrees in electrical engineering from University of
Tehran, Tehran, Iran, in 2007 and 2010, respectively.
, He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree at
DG2: 20 kVA, 480 V(L-L), 60 Hz, , University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada.
, , , , His research interests include control and stability
, analysis of microgrids and smart grid systems.
: 480 V, : 42 kVA
L1: , L2: , L3:
(without damping): ,

(with damping): Yasser Abdel-Rady I. Mohamed (M’06–SM’011)

was born in Cairo, Egypt, on November 25, 1977. He
received the B.Sc. (with honors) and M.Sc. degrees
(without damping): , , , in electrical engineering from Ain Shams University,
, Cairo, in 2000 and 2004, respectively, and the Ph.D.
degree in electrical engineering from the University
of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada, in 2008.
REFERENCES He is currently with the Department of Electrical
[1] M. Marwali and A. Keyhani, “Control of distributed generation sys- and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta,
tems—Part I: Voltages and currents control,” IEEE Trans. Power Elec- Canada, as an Assistant Professor. His research
tron., vol. 19, no. 6, pp. 1541–1550, 2004. interests include dynamics and controls of power
[2] G. Weiss, Q. Zhong, T. Green, and J. Liang, “ repetitive control of converters; distributed and renewable generation; modeling, analysis and
DC-AC converters in microgrids,” IEEE Trans. Power Electron., vol. control of smart grids; electric machines and motor drives.
19, pp. 219–230, Jan. 2004. Dr. Mohamed is an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS
[3] H. Karimi, E. J. Davison, and R. Iravani, “Multivariable servomech- ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS. He is also a Guest Editor of the IEEE
anism controller for autonomous operation of a distributed generation TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS Special Section on “Distributed
unit: Design and performance evaluation,” IEEE Trans. Power Syst., Generation and Microgrids.” His biography is listed in Marquis Who’s Who in
vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 853–865, 2010. the World. He is a Registered Professional Engineer in the Province of Alberta.