Design and Control for LCL-Based Inverters with Both Grid-Tie and Standalone Parallel Operations

The inductor-capacitor-inductor (LCL) filter allows higher noise attenuation and universal output in which a power conditioning system or an inverter can operate in both grid-tie and standalone modes. In this paper, the LCL filter design considerations including sensor position selection and component selections are discussed for single-phase paralleled inverters operating in both grid-tie and standalone modes. For grid-tie mode operation, each inverter is operating under a single current loop with proportional-resonant controller and admittance path compensation to reduce the steady-state error by providing a high gain at the fundamental frequency. For standalone mode operation, one of the inverters is implemented with a dual-loop controller to regulate the output voltage while the rest inverters operate in single current-loop controller with communication channels in between to ensure the uniformity of current sharing. Both the simulation and experimental results verify that the designed controllers are capable of paralleling inverter operation in grid-tie and standalone modes by adapting to different controller settings while keeping the same hardware setup.