Droop control method for circulating current reduction in parallel operation of BESS

Abstract

This paper proposes a new reduction scheme of circulating current when two units of BESS (Battery Energy Storage System) are operated in parallel with conventional droop control. In case of using conventional droop, the terminal voltage of each BESS are not equal due to the unequal line impedance, which causes the circulating current. The operation performance of BESS is critically dependant on the circulating current because it increases system losses which causes the increasement of required system rating. This paper introduces a new reduction scheme of circulating current in which the terminal voltage difference of each BESS is compensated by adding feed-forward path of line voltage drop to the droop control. The feasibility of proposed scheme was first verified by computer simulations with PSCAD/EMTDC software. After then a hardware prototype with 5kW rating was built in the lab and many experiments were carried out. The experimental results were compared with the simulation results to confirm the feasibility of proposed scheme. Two parallel operating BESS with proposed scheme shows more accurate performance to suppress the circulating current than those with the conventional droop control.