Design of a cooperative voltage harmonic compensation strategy for islanded microgrids combining virtual admittance and repetitive controller

Nonlinear loads (NLLs) in three-phase systems are known to produce current harmonics at -5, 7, -11, 13,... times the fundamental frequency. However, harmonics of the same frequencies are induced in microgrid voltage thereby reducing the power quality. Dedicated equipment, such as active power filters, can be used to compensate the microgrid harmonics. Alternatively, each distributed generation (DG) unit present in the microgrid can also be used for the same. The use of the virtual admittance concept combined with a proportional integral with resonant controller (PI-RES) control structure has previously been proposed as a harmonic compensation sharing strategy when multiple DGs operate in parallel. The drawback of this methodology is that a large number of RES controllers might be required to compensate for all the harmonic components induced by NLLs, increasing the tuning complexity as well as the execution time. This paper proposes the combined use of virtual admittance control loop and repetitive controller (RC) for harmonic compensation. The main advantage of the proposed method is that only one RC is required to compensate for all the harmonic components, significantly reducing the computational burden and the design complexity. The dynamic performance of the whole system is tested under variable NLL. © 1972-2012 IEEE