Intelligent and Fast Model-Free Sliding Mode Control for Shipboard DC Microgrids

Robust nonlinear control of regenerative fuel cell, supercapacitor, battery and wind based direct current microgrid

It is well known that there is a design tradeoff between voltage regulation and load current sharing in conventional linear droop control for several parallel-connected distributed sources in a DC microgrid. To improve both performance areas, this article proposes a design method to identify the nonlinear droop curve coefficient with the desired bus voltage regulation and current sharing accuracy in a specified heavy load range, while a linear droop function with a negative droop resistance is used to tighten the bus voltage regulation in the light load range. The design procedure of load boundary and the effect of negative droop resistances on the system stability are analyzed in detail. Also, a boost-up and curve-fitting method can further improve the voltage regulation and achieve smooth transition between light load and heavy load. In this way, no additional voltage compensation loop is needed. Two parallel-connected DC converters are finally built to verify the theoretical analysis.

Advancements in power conversion efficiency and the growing prevalence of DC loads worldwide have underscored the importance of DC microgrids in modern energy systems. Addressing the challenges of power-sharing and voltage stability in these DC microgrids has been a prominent research focus. Sliding mode control (SMC) has demonstrated remarkable performance in various power electronic converter applications. This paper proposes the integration of universal droop control (UDC) with SMC to facilitate distributed energy resource interfacing and power-sharing control in DC microgrids. Compared to traditional Proportional-Integral (PI) control, the proposed control approach exhibits superior dynamic response characteristics. The UDC is strategically incorporated prior to the SMC and establishes limits on voltage variation and maximum power drawn from the DC–DC converters within the microgrid. A dynamic model of the DC–DC converter is developed as the initial stage, focusing on voltage regulation at the DC link through nonlinear control laws tailored for Distributed Generation (DG)-based converters. The UDC ensures voltage stability in the DC microgrid by imposing predetermined power constraints on the DGs. Comparative evaluations, involving different load scenarios, have been conducted to assess the performance of the proposed UDC-based SMC control in comparison to the PI control-based system. The results demonstrate the superior efficiency of the UDC-based SMC control in handling dynamic load changes. Furthermore, a practical test of the proposed controller has been conducted using a hardware prototype of a DC microgrid.

Droop control is the basic control method for load current sharing in dc microgrid applications. The conventional dc droop control method is realized by linearly reducing the dc output voltage as the output current increases. This method has two limitations. First, with the consideration of line resistance in a droop-controlled dc microgrid, since the output voltage of each converter cannot be exactly the same, the output current sharing accuracy is degraded. Second, the dc-bus voltage deviation increases with the load due to the droop action. In this paper, in order to improve the performance of the dc microgrid operation, a low-bandwidth communication (LBC)-based improved droop control method is proposed. In contrast with the conventional approach, the control system does not require a centralized secondary controller. Instead, it uses local controllers and the LBC network to exchange information between converter units. The droop controller is employed to achieve independent operation, and the average voltage and current controllers are used in each converter to simultaneously enhance the current sharing accuracy and restore the dc bus voltage. All of the controllers are realized locally, and the LBC system is only used for changing the values of the dc voltage and current. Hence, a decentralized control scheme is accomplished. The simulation test based on MATLAB/Simulink and the experimental validation based on a 2 × 2.2 kW prototype were implemented to demonstrate the proposed approach.

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This paper aims to design decentralized controllers for different components in islanded DC microgrids. The major components in the DC microgrid as considered in this paper include a fuel cell, solar photovoltaic (PV) unit, and battery energy storage system (BESS) along with critical and non-critical loads. The main control objective is to maintain the power balance within the DC microgrid through the regulation of the common DC-bus voltage. The controllers are designed based on the dynamical models of the fuel cell, solar PV unit, and BESS. The feedback linearization technique is employed to obtain the control laws, which simplifies the original dynamical models and decouples different components in the form of several subsystems. In this way, the feedback linearization technique allows different components in DC microgrids to achieve the desired control objectives by using only the local information (i.e., in a decentralized manner). The performance of the proposed decentralized controllers for different components is evaluated on a test DC microgrid under different operating conditions. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed control scheme performs in a much better way as compared to an existing proportional integral controller.

Distributed control of converters is important to achieve plug and play functionality in a dc microgrid. It must ensure proportional load sharing among converters and voltage regulation of the dc bus. Droop control is a conventional distributed control method to achieve load sharing among converters in a dc microgrid. It is realized by reducing the voltage reference, linearly or dynamically, as the load increases. This degrades the voltage regulation as the overall bus voltage decreases as the load increases. In this paper, a sliding mode control based adaptive voltage tuning method is proposed such that the voltage reference is adjusted dynamically above and below the desired dc bus voltage to achieve load sharing. This results in excellent voltage regulation, also the proposed control is realized locally hence it facilitates plug and play functionality. The per unit input current value is exchanged among the neighboring converters. The proposed controller is validated through simulation.

DC microgrids are gaining popularity due to their lack of reactive power compensation, frequency synchronization, and skin effect problems. However, DC microgrids are not exempted from stability issues. The stability of DC microgrids based on decentralized architecture is presented in this paper. Centralized architecture can degrade system performance and reliability due to the failure of a single central controller. Droop with proportional integral (PI) controller based on decentralized architecture is being used for DC microgrid stability. However, droop control requires a tradeoff between voltage regulation and droop gain. Further, global stability through PI controller cannot be verified and controller parameters cannot be optimized with different operating conditions. To address limitations, an equivalent sliding mode (SM) controller is proposed for a DC microgrid system in this paper. Detailed simulations are carried out, and results are presented, which show the effectiveness of an equivalent SM controller.

As the conventional AC power grid is evolving with the integration of renewable energy resources (PV and wind) and power electronic converters, we discover more technical and economic values for DC microgrids (MGs), particularly with electric vehicles (EVs) and battery energy storage systems (BESSs) changing the load landscape. This paper presents a double-layer centralized hierarchical control framework to achieve the DC bus voltage regulation and power coordination of a PV-BESSs based DC MG, which operates in fully islanding condition. The proposed control strategy consists of two levels: 1) The primary control can achieve the DC bus voltage regulation by modifying the commonly-used inner and outer PI control loops; 2) The secondary control considers the characteristics of different types of BESSs. The latter is also responsible for load sharing by generating power/current reference signals among different DGs and DC converters. The advantage of the proposed control strategy is to eliminate the droop control as well as the conventional secondary control, which is designed to restore the voltage deviation caused by droop equations in a three-level hierarchical control system. The simulation results show that the proposed control strategy is effective to stabilize the DC bus voltage and it can share the dynamic power variation within DC MG.

The integration of renewable energy resources to DC microgrid has captured the attention of the researchers in recent years. One of the active field of application of DC distribution is the islanded DC microgrid (DC ImG). The DC ImG present numerous challenges to researchers. Among many challenges, the regulation of voltage and stability of the system is indispensable to efficient operation. The voltage stability problem becomes more prominent when the system is exposed to disturbances and possess uncertainties in parameters. However, challenges can be overcome by skilful design of a robust controller for the system. Therefore, in this paper, an output-feedback based centralized robust control scheme is proposed. The proposed controller is designed to maintain good control performance in the presence of parametric uncertainties and exogenous disturbances. The uncertainties of the DC microgrid is modelled as a linear time-varying state-space system. The upper and the lower bounds of the time-varying parameters are determined by a Lebesque-measurable matrix. To attenuate the exogenous disturbances of the system [Formula: see text] based output-feedback controller is designed. The system stability is assured by the Lyapunov function candidate. The output-feedback controller needs only the voltage measurement; therefore, it requires less communication bandwidth as compared to the state-feedback. To obtain the controller parameters linear matrix inequality constraints are formulated and solved. The performance of the proposed controller is verified via simulations and compared with the existing schemes.

In direct current (DC) microgrids, traditional droop control methods facilitate power sharing and stabilize bus voltage. However, this communication‐less approach is constrained by challenges including insufficient voltage restoration and imbalances in battery state of charge (SOC). This paper introduces a novel communication‐less control strategy designed to address these limitations in photovoltaic energy storage system (PV‐ESS) DC microgrids. This method assigns the energy storage unit (ESU) closest to the critical load as the ‘master unit’ setting its output voltage to nominal levels. This master unit injects an alternating current (AC) signal into the DC bus, with the signal frequency modulated by its SOC and output current. Additional ESUs, referred to as ‘slave units’ adjust their output currents based on the frequency of the AC signal and their local SOC. Furthermore, the master unit utilizes a logical signal based on its SOC to switch the photovoltaic module between droop control mode and maximum power point tracking (MPPT) mode. Stability analysis verifies the robustness of the proposed method, and simulation results demonstrate that it surpasses conventional droop control approaches. Specifically, the proposed method enhances load‐sharing precision, minimizes voltage deviation, and ensures SOC equalization across the DC microgrid without the need for communication links. © 2026 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC.

Droop control is a commonly used method for load current sharing among the converters in DC microgrid applications. However, in this method, the current sharing and load voltage regulation are affected by cable resistances and other non-idealities. The conventional droop control method’s performance can be improved using secondary control algorithms that involve low-bandwidth communication channels. In this paper, an improved secondary control algorithm is proposed for a multi-source, single load bus DC microgrid system. In the proposed algorithm, the load voltage information is communicated to the individual converters, and there are no communication channels between individual converters. Thus the proposed algorithm achieves accurate current sharing and improved load voltage regulation with reduced communication channels compared to several state-of-the-art approaches. All the controllers in the proposed algorithm are implemented locally, and hence a decentralized control is achieved. The proposed algorithm’s effectiveness is validated using circuit simulations and hardware-based experiments on a two converter single load bus DC microgrid system.

Shipboard power systems have different characteristics than the utility power systems. In the Shipboard power system it is crucial that the systems and equipment work at their peak performance levels. One of the most demanding aspects for simulations of the Shipboard Power Systems is to connect the device under test to a real-time simulated dynamic equivalent and in an environment with actual hardware in the Loop (HIL). The real time simulations can be achieved by using multi-distributed modeling concept, in which the global system model is distributed over several processors through a communication link. The advantage of this approach is that it permits the gradual change from pure simulation to actual application. In order to perform system studies in such an environment physical phase variable models of different components of the shipboard power system were developed using operational parameters obtained from finite element (FE) analysis. These models were developed for two types of studies low and high frequency studies. Low frequency studies are used to examine the shipboard power systems behavior under load switching, and faults. High-frequency studies were used to predict abnormal conditions due to overvoltage, and components harmonic behavior. Different experiments were conducted to validate the developed models. The Simulation and experiment results show excellent agreement. The shipboard power systems components behavior under internal faults was investigated using FE analysis. This developed technique is very curial in the Shipboard power systems faults detection due to the lack of comprehensive fault test databases. A wavelet based methodology for feature extraction of the shipboard power systems current signals was developed for harmonic and fault diagnosis studies. This modeling methodology can be utilized to evaluate and predicate the NPS components future behavior in the design stage which will reduce the development cycles, cut overall cost, prevent failures, and test each subsystem exhaustively before integrating it into the system.

This research project studies: 1) control and operation of islanded DC Microgrids (MG) including simultaneous Load Sharing (LS) and voltage regulation (VR) through a decentralised control method, 2) energy management and applications of Battery Energy Storage Systems (BESS) in islanded DC MGs, 3) integration of DC MGs into the AC network, and 4) power balance in hybrid AC/DC MGs.

Due to the uneven distribution of virtual resistance and line impedance in the DC micro-grid, the traditional droop control has the contradiction between current sharing and voltage regulation. In this paper, the droop control based on the discrete consensus algorithm is adopted. Each power generation unit adopts adjacent communication, and the reference value of the DC bus voltage is corrected according to the mean value after the iterative of the system voltage, thereby compensating for the voltage drop caused by the droop control. The photovoltaic (PV) cell adopts the maximum power tracking (MPPT) control. The battery adopts the constant voltage control with current threshold, which can keep the DC bus voltage stable, and the outlet current is prevented from being too large to shorten the service life of the battery. Stable operation of the DC micro-grid is realized. Finally, the PV/battery DC micro-grid model is built in Simulink. When the environmental conditions and load change, the micro-grid can ensure the DC bus voltage constant and the active power balance, which verifies the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.