Collaborative Voltage Unbalance Compensation in Islanded AC Microgrids With Grid-Forming Inverters

The presence of unbalanced loads in power systems creates voltage imbalances that perturb the operation of sensitive loads, such as induction motors, power electronics converters, and adjustable speed drives. This article presents a novel control scheme that achieves accurate voltage balance at any node of an islanded ac microgrid with seamless integration with the existing hierarchical control of the microgrid. A master-slave architecture is adopted for the unbalance compensation due to its low network traffic requirements and its modular conception. The unbalance compensation follows a collaborative principle where current injections are computed as a function of the current rating of each inverter, thus avoiding the overcurrent stress of the unbalance compensation by a single inverter. This article presents the stability analysis and the design guidelines for the control parameters. The performance of the control proposal has been successfully tested in a laboratory microgrid. Selected experimental results are presented.