Weighted Bandwidth Method for Stability Assessment of Complex DC Power Systems on Ships

Abstract

In shipboard DC grids, tightly controlled load converters can impair the system stability, thus provoking the ship blackout. Conversely, load converters regulated by low control bandwidths are capable of inducing a stabilizing action. This compensation is verifiable if the loads are few. On the contrary, the balancing of control dynamics is hardly evaluated if the bus feeds multiple (i.e., hundreds or more) DC controlled loads. In this paper, the weighted bandwidth method (WBM) is presented to assess the small-signal stability of a complex shipboard power system by aggregating the multiple converters into two sets of controlled loads. Once the validity of the aggregation is proven, a stability study is performed on the two-loads system. As the last system is more inclined to instability than the initial multiple-loads system, the verification of the two-loads stability criterion guarantees that the shipboard DC grid also remains stable. Finally, emulations on HIL verify the proposed stability assessment thus providing the first unique verification of WBM.