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Tightly regulated power electronic converters show negative impedance characteristics and behave as a constant power load (CPL) which sink constant power from their input bus. This incremental negative impedance characteristics of tightly regulated point-of-load converters in multi-converter power systems have a destabilising effect on source converters and may destabilise the whole system. Similar phenomena also occur in many situations like dc microgrid, vehicular power system. Here, the authors present a robust pulse-width modulation-based sliding-mode controller for a dc/dc boost converter feeding the CPL in a typical dc microgrid scenario. A non-linear surface is proposed which ensures constant power to be delivered to the load. The existence of sliding mode and stability of the sliding surface are proved. The proposed controller is implemented using OPAL-RT real-time digital simulator on a laboratory prototype of dc/dc boost converter system. The effectiveness of the proposed sliding-mode controller is validated through simulation and experimental results under different operating conditions.

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DC microgrid consists of cascaded power converters in which the constant power load behaviour of point-of-load converters poses challenging stability issues even if individual converters are stable. In this paper, a robust sliding mode controller has been proposed for DC/DC bidirectional buckboost converter interfacing storage unit in an islanded DC microgrid environment. The controller is designed to ensure DC bus voltage regulation in the presence of renewable energy source and predominantly constant power loads. The performance of the proposed controller is validated through real-time simulation conducted using OPAL-RT® Digital Simulator. The controller ensures DC bus voltage regulation within tight limits and is robust with respect to wide variations in the renewable energy source power and the load.

A controller to mitigate the destabilizing effect of constant power load (CPL) is proposed for a DC/DC buck-boost converter. The load profile has been considered to be predominantly of CPL type. The negative incremental resistance of the CPL tends to destabilize the feeder system, which may be an input filter or another DC/DC converter. The proposed sliding mode controller aims to ensure system stability under the dominance of CPL. The effectiveness of the controller has been validated through real-time simulation studies and experiments under various operating conditions. The controller has been demonstrated to be robust with respect to variations in supply voltage and load and capable of mitigating instabilities induced by CPL. Furthermore, the controller has been validated using all possible load profiles, which may arise in modern-day DC-distributed power systems.