Distributed adaptive power management for medium voltage ship power systems

Systems are being developed for power distribution on future navy ships to effectively incorporate advanced electrical systems requiring DC power. These islanded DC microgrids provide new challenges to the management of power flow throughout the system, and thus require advanced controls to accurately regulate and stabilise the systems during changing operational conditions. Therefore, adaptive droop control is proposed as a power management layer for these maritime DC microgrids. This paper reports on a method that uses adaptation of the controller parameters to account for uncertainty and changes in the system in order to accurately regulate the power sharing among distributed generation sources and to stabilise the bus voltage of the system. The proposed method is applied to a virtual prototype of a medium voltage direct current (MVDC) ship power system and demonstrated through notional operational scenarios to test the effectiveness of the control algorithm utilising controller hardware in the loop (CHIL) experimentation.