Low-Order Passivity-Based Robust Current Control Design for Grid-Tied VSCs

Abstract

This article presents a systematic robust current control design approach for three-phase voltage-source converters. Robustness is guaranteed by combining intrinsic passive properties of the impedance uncertainty at the point of common coupling together with stability results from a passivity-based control theory. This approach ensures stability against typical uncertainty sources at mid and high frequencies, such as cable resonances or other converters interaction, with significant less conservative performances than the obtained with the traditional robust control theory. The approach uses multiobjective controller synthesis formulation that allows us to logically combine robustness requirements with performance objectives avoiding heuristic iteration over the control structure and parameters. The controller synthesis is performed by means of a nonsmooth \mathcal {H}{\infty } optimization technique that tunes all free parameters of a vector-based controller function, which constraints its structure. This results in a synthesized controller with lower order than those obtained with convex optimization definitions of the \mathcal {H}{\infty } control problem. The design methodology is validated in time and frequency domain by means of theoretical analysis and experimental results with three usual grid filters: L, LCL, and LLCL.