DC Bus Voltage Control of Islanded Microgrid using Renewable Energy Based Distributed Generation

Abstract

DC bus voltage control in DC islanded microgrids is essential for the power quality and reliability. There are various algorithms being used in the literature review to control the bus voltages of DC microgrids. However, most of the research works controlled the generation side that requires high performance devices such as super capacitors etc., On the other hand, battery storage systems are also being used to regulate the bus voltage. In this research work, a separate strategy was developed in which battery storage was implemented at the load side to maintain stability of DC bus voltage. The load management scheme is introduced in which during the voltage instability, the loads are cutoff from the main supply and local installed storage system feed the loads. A particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique was used to optimally decide for the load in watts to be operated. A DC microgrid hardware was designed to test the control algorithm. The loads are not connected to the main system until the power supply is stable again. The load management scheme not only reduces the cost of the system but also stabilizes the overall system with 60% charge available in the batteries using the proposed load management scheme. The results were achieved while performing experiments on developed DC Microgrid hardware.