Virtual impedance, angle droop and frequency droop control play important roles in maintaining system stability, and load sharing among distributed generators (DGs) in microgrid. These approaches have been developed into three totally independent concepts, but present strong relevance. In this letter, their similarities and differences are significantly revealed. Some new findings are established as follows: 1) angle droop control is intrinsically a virtual impedance method; 2) virtual impedance method can also be regarded as a special frequency droop control with a power derivative feedback; 3) the combination of virtual impedance method and frequency droop control is equivalent to the proportional-derivative (PD) type frequency droop, which is introduced to enhance the power oscillation damping. As a whole, these analogous relationships provide the new insight into the design of these three controllers.
For microgrid in islanded operation, due to the effects of mismatched line impedance, the reactive power could not be shared accurately with the conventional droop method. To improve the reactive power sharing accuracy, this paper proposes an improved droop control method. The proposed method mainly includes two important operations: error reduction operation and voltage recovery operation. The sharing accuracy is improved by the sharing error reduction operation, which is activated by the low-bandwidth synchronization signals. However, the error reduction operation will result in a decrease in output voltage amplitude. Therefore, the voltage recovery operation is proposed to compensate the decrease. The needed communication in this method is very simple, and the plug-and-play is reserved. Simulations and experimental results show that the improved droop controller can share load active and reactive power, improve the power quality of the microgrid, and also have a good dynamic performance.
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