Hardware implementation of droop control for isolated AC microgrids

Lately the integration of Distributed generation systems privileging renewable sources for offshore regions is growing to view a reduction of air pollutant emissions. Due to the intermittency of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) it must be necessary to develop a quality advanced control of the involved power interfaces to warrant the frequency and voltage required by ac off-shore loads taking into account the absence of grid connection. The droops control is a well known control strategy used for load sharing using local information of the inverters active and reactive powers. This paper presents the experimental validation of droop control strategy, using ADAptive LInear NEuron (ADALINE) signal decomposition technique for the VSI synchronization, and within a realistic scenario representing an autonomous microgrid. The advantages of the real-time operation and parallel multi task operation have been exploited using the FPGA devices, which have been employed for the hardware implementation of each VSI (Voltage Source Inverter) control. Simulation, co-simulation and experimental results are provided to verify the validity of the proposed implementation.