Supervisory Control of an Adaptive-Droop Regulated DC Microgrid with Battery Management Capability

DC power systems are gaining an increasing interest in renewable energy applications because of the good matching with dc output type sources such as photovoltaic (PV) systems and secondary batteries. In this paper, several distributed generators (DGs) have been merged together with a pair of batteries and loads to form an autonomous dc Microgrid (MG). To overcomethe control challenge associated with coordination of multiple batteries within one stand-alone MG, a double-layer hierarchical control strategy was proposed; 1) The unit-level primary control layer was established by an adaptive voltage-droop (VD) method aimed to regulate the common bus voltage and to sustain thestates of charge (SOCs) of batteries close to each other during moderate replenishment. The control of every unit was expanded with unit-specific algorithm, i.e. finish-of-charging for batteries and maximum power point tracking (MPPT) for renewable energy sources (RESs), with which a smooth on-line overlap was designed; 2) the supervisory control layer was designed touse the low bandwidth communication interface between the central controller and sources in order to collect data needed for adaptive calculation of virtual resistances (VRs) as well as transit criteria for changing unit-level operating modes. A small-signal stability for the whole range of VRs. The performance of developed control was assessed through experimental results.