| dc.description.abstract | In recent years, the electrical network has been evolving towards becoming a more sustainable system, the present environmental concerns regarding the greenhouse gas emission by the energy sector have pushed forward the integration of alternative generation units that promote the decarbonization of the energy production sector. Over the past decades the integration of these ``cleaner'' energy generation systems has been done in an On-grid and an Off-grid fashion, however, this integration strategy encountered some problems regarding key areas such as control and management, just to mention a few. The microgrid concept is then created to overcome these issues, allowing a seamless integration to the electrical network of the growing alternative generation assets, improving how these ``cleaner'' energy production alternatives are managed into more sustainable systems.
In Microgrids with a high penetration of renewable energy sources, power converters are used to regulate the produced energy to a single voltage and frequency reference value across the microgrid. Adequate incorporation of an LC filter at the output of power electronic devices allows the attenuation of harmful harmonics that can be introduced to the microgrid's energy bus. By traditional methods, LC filter values can be calculated by means of the power rating, switching frequency, cutoff frequency, and using the bode frequency domain. It is important to consider that, a microgrid including distributed generators can operate connected to the main electrical network or in an isolated manner, referred to as island operation. The transition between both states can occur voluntarily, but a disconnection can also happen unexpectedly. The associated transients can be harmful to the grid, and compensating actions must be triggered to avoid service interruption, preserve power quality, and minimize the possibility of faults.
It is important to consider that in transition from a connected to an autonomous microgrid operation, the calculated LC filter can lead to high harmonic injection. As a result, a tuning methodology capable of obtaining the right set of parameters for the LC filter for such transition events can improve the performance of the microgrid. Alternately, such transition events must be detected to enable compensating action; island detection methods are essential to this end. Such techniques typically depend on communication networks or on the introduction of minor electrical disturbances to identify and broadcast unexpected islanding events. However, local energy resources are distributed, variable, and are expected to be integrated in a plug-and-play manner; then, conventional island detection strategies can be ineffective as they rely on specific infrastructure.
To overcome those problems, this work proposes to improve the islanding phenomenon in two main contributions. To tackle the issues in regards to the introduction of harmful transients by traditional LC filters, this work optimizes the LC output parameters with respect to the size of the filter components, the IEEE Std 519-2014, and bandwidth of the filter, within a bounded region of values subjected to performance conditions such as voltage output, and the produced total harmonic distortion measurements during the transition from a connected to an autonomous operation. In a case study, genetic algorithm optimization is used to obtain the LC filter parameters and compared to a conventional arithmetic methodology to obtain the values of the filter. The optimization results in a set of values that lead to a higher harmonic attenuation after the transition rather than a conventional method using the switching frequency as the main design factor.
In the other end of the islanding phenomenon, where islanding events must be detected while avoiding traditional infrastructure setbacks, a straightforward, distributed island detection technique is proposed, this technique relies only on local electrical measurements, available at the output of each generating unit. The proposed method is based on the estimated power-frequency ratio, associated with the stiffness of the grid. A ``stiffness change'' effectively reveals island operating conditions, discards heavy load variations, and enables independent (distributed) operation. The proposal was validated through digital simulations and an experimental test-bed. Such test-bed consists of a Real-Time HIL implementation, the proposed island detection algorithm is programmed to run in an embedded format while connected to a Real-Time simulator running a microgrid equivalent model in the form of a three-phase parallel RLC load as recommended by the IEEE Std. 929 and IEEE Std. 1547 for islanding detection. Results showed that the proposed technique can effectively detect island operation at each generating unit interacting in the microgrid. Moreover, it was about three times faster than other reported techniques. | |
