Cascaded controller for a standalone microgrid-connected inverter based on tripleaction controller and particle swarm optimisation

Abstract

In this study, power quality (PQ) improvement has been addressed, in the form of total harmonic distortion (THD) minimisation, as well as, voltage regulation using two cascaded schemes. The first scheme is the optimised triple action controller (TAC)-based pulse width modulated voltage source inverter. TAC consists of a proportional resonant controller, selective harmonic compensator, and a new added current-assisted feed forward controller. The second scheme is the optimised cascaded dual-level control of a standalone microgrid. Cascaded level control consists of droop, secondary, and synchronisation control loops. The two approaches have been optimised for best parameter selection out of the possible solution space using a particle swarm optimisation algorithm to satisfy the study objectives. The optimisation objectives/ constraints were to minimise THD and minimise overshoot/undershoot, rise time, and steady-state error for voltage compensation under two disturbance scenarios, sudden load change, and voltage flicker injection as a power frequency disturbance. These research results have been compared to other existing simulation and experimental work. The results proved to be better in output voltage, frequency, response time, and THD. Furthermore, the proposed schemes ensure power factor improvement, high efficiency, overall system PQ, and reliability at various load conditions.