Battery (electricity)

Quantum mechanics

Control (management)

Voltage

Engineering

Control engineering

Power optimizer

Power (physics)

Computer science

Distributed generation

Classical mechanics

Grid

Maximum power point tracking

Physics

AC power

Renewable energy

Mathematics

Slack bus

Inverter

Energy storage

Electronic engineering

Power-flow study

Inertia

Artificial intelligence

Geometry

Microgrid

Control theory (sociology)

Electrical engineering

Power management

IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics

This article presents a power management strategy (PMS) to control the power flow in a dc microgrid operating in the grid-connected mode. The microgrid model is composed of the ac utility grid interfaced with a voltage source inverter operating as a grid-forming converter (VSC), an energy storage system (ESS) formed by a battery bank and a bidirectional dc-dc converter operating as a grid-supporting unit, a distributed generation acting as a grid-feeding unit, and the customer loads with strict voltage regulation. The power management technique applies a virtual inertia concept together with a state of charge-based management function to regulate the charging and discharging process of the battery bank according to the dc microgrid power flow. Thus, high-rate peaks of power are avoided, which improves the ESS life cycle. With the proposed PMS, an autonomous power flow is achieved inside the dc microgrid, while the ac utility grid focuses exclusively upon forming the dc bus and processing the surplus or shortage of power. In addition, the proposed strategy simplifies the communication link between the grid inverter and the ESS, since the VSC power is the sole information exchanged. The experimental results show that the proposed PMS is reliable, leading to high ESS performance and power flow control within the dc microgrid, without degrading the dc bus voltage.

Power Management Strategy Based on Virtual Inertia for DC Microgrids