Distributed Cooperative Secondary Control for Voltage Unbalance Compensation in an Islanded Microgrid

This paper presents a distributed cooperative control scheme for voltage unbalance compensation (VUC) in an islanded microgrid (MC). By letting each distributed generator (DC) share the compensation effort cooperatively, unbalanced voltage in sensitive load bus (SLB) can be compensated. The concept of contribution level (CL) for compensation is first proposed for each local DC to indicate its compensation ability. A two-layer secondary compensation architecture consisting of a communication layer and a compensation layer is designed for each local DC. A totally distributed strategy involving information sharing and exchange is proposed, which is based on finite-time average consensus and newly developed graph discovery algorithm. This strategy does not require the whole system structure as a prior and can detect the structure automatically. The proposed scheme not only achieves similar VUC performance to the centralized one, but also brings some advantages, such as communication fault tolerance and plug-and-play property. Case studies including communication failure, CL variation, and DC plug-and-play are discussed and tested to validate the proposed method.