A Fast State-of-Charge (SOC) Balancing and Current Sharing Control Strategy for Distributed Energy Storage Units in a DC Microgrid

Abstract

In isolated operation, DC microgrids require multiple distributed energy storage units (DESUs) to accommodate the variability of distributed generation (DG). The traditional control strategy has the problem of uneven allocation of load current when the line impedance is not matched. As the state-of-charge (SOC) balancing proceeds, the SOC difference gradually decreases, leading to a gradual decrease in the balancing rate. Thus, an improved SOC droop control strategy is introduced in this paper, which uses a combination of power and exponential functions to improve the virtual impedance responsiveness to SOC changes and introduces an adaptive acceleration factor to improve the slow SOC balancing problem. We construct a sparse communication network to achieve information exchange between DESU neighboring units. A global optimization controller employing the consistency algorithm is designed to mitigate the impact of line impedance mismatch on SOC balancing and current allocation. This approach uses a single controller to restore DC bus voltage, effectively reducing control connections and alleviating the communication burden on the system. Lastly, a simulation model of the DC microgrid is developed using MATLAB/Simulink R2021b. The results confirm that the proposed control strategy achieves rapid SOC balancing and the precise allocation of load currents in various complex operational scenarios.