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Despite its advantages over its AC counterparts, DC microgrids present a lot of challenges. One of these challenges is the instability issues caused by constant power loads (CPLs). CPLs deteriorate the system’s performance due to their incremental negative impedance characteristics. In this paper, a DC microgrid composed of a PV/battery system feeding a pure CPL was considered. A continuous-time model predictive control combined with a disturbance observer was applied to the DC–DC bidirectional converter. The purpose of the composite controller is to address the nonlinearity of the CPL and to maintain the stability of the system in a large operating region under load and PV generation variations. To show the performance of the system, several tests were performed under PV power and CPL power variations. Simulation results show good performance in terms of transient response, optimal tracking, and stability in a large operating region.

Highlights• This paper presents the design and implementation of a simple and powerful control method for PVEs.• The manuscript also presents an efficient method to extract the PV model parameters.• The proposed prototype behaves precisely as the studied solar panel.

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