Microgrids consist of multiple parallel-connected distributed generation (DG) units with coordinated control strategies, which are able to operate in both grid-connected and islanded mode. Microgrids are attracting more and more attention since they can alleviate the stress of main transmission systems, reduce feeder losses, and improve system power quality. When the islanded microgrids are concerned, it is important to maintain system stability and achieve load power sharing among the multiple parallel-connected DG units. However, the poor active and reactive power sharing problems due to the influence of impedance mismatch of the DG feeders and the different ratings of the DG units are inevitable when the conventional droop control scheme is adopted. Therefore, the adaptive/improved droop control, network-based control methods and cost-based droop schemes are compared and summarized in this paper for active power sharing. Moreover, nonlinear and unbalanced loads could further affect the reactive power sharing when regulating the active power, and it is difficult to share the reactive power accurately only by using the enhanced virtual impedance method. Therefore, the hierarchical control strategies are utilized as supplements of the conventional droop controls and virtual impedance methods. The improved hierarchical control approaches such as the algorithms based on graph theory, multi-agent system, the gain scheduling method and predictive control have been proposed to achieve proper reactive power sharing for islanded microgrids and eliminate the effect of the communication delays on hierarchical control. Finally, the future research trends on islanded microgrids are also discussed in this paper.

In this paper, an enhanced hierarchical control structure with multiple current loop damping schemes for voltage unbalance and harmonics compensation in ac islanded microgrid is proposed to address unequal power sharing problems. The distributed generation (DG) is properly controlled to autonomously compensate voltage unbalance and harmonics while sharing the compensation effort for the real power, reactive power, unbalance and harmonic powers. The proposed control system of the microgrid mainly consists of the positive sequence real and reactive power droop controllers, voltage and current controllers, the selective virtual impedance loop, the unbalance and harmonics compensators, the secondary control for voltage amplitude and frequency restoration, and the auxiliary control to achieve a high voltage quality at the point of common coupling (PCC). By using the proposed unbalance and harmonics compensation (UHC), the auxiliary control, and the virtual positive/negative-sequence impedance (VPI/VNI) loops at fundamental frequency, and the virtual variable harmonic impedance (VVHI) loop at harmonic frequencies, an accurate power sharing is achieved. Moreover, the low bandwidth communication (LBC) technique is adopted to send the compensation command of the secondary control and auxiliary control from the microgrid control center (MGCC) to the local controllers of DG unit. Finally, the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) results using dSPACE 1006 platform are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

In this paper, the modeling, controller design, and stability analysis of the islanded microgrid (MG) using enhanced hierarchical control structure with multiple current loop damping schemes is proposed. The islanded MG is consisted of the parallel-connected voltage source inverters using LCL output filters, and the proposed control structure includes: the primary control with additional phase-shift loop, the secondary control for voltage amplitude and frequency restoration, the virtual impedance loops which contains virtual positive-and negative-sequence impedance loops at fundamental frequency, and virtual variable harmonic impedance loop at harmonic frequencies, and the inner voltage and current loop controllers. A small-signal model for the primary and secondary controls with additional phase-shift loop is presented, which shows an over-damped feature from eigenvalue analysis of the state matrix. The moving average filter-based sequence decomposition method is proposed to extract the fundamental positive and negative sequences, and harmonic components. The multiple inner current loop damping scheme is presented, including the virtual positive, virtual negative and variable harmonic sequence impedance loops for reactive and harmonic power sharing purposes and the proposed active damping scheme using capacitor current feedback loop of the LCL-filter, which shows enhanced damping characteristics and improved inner-loop stability. Finally, the experimental results are provided to validate the feasibility of the proposed approach.