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Renewable energy sources are growing in importance and reshaping power systems through microgrid (MG) networks. Some relevant issues in the management of an MG need to be addressed, such as voltage and frequency control, power balance between sources (sharing) and distributed loads, stability, security, power quality, etc. As a contribution, this manuscript presents a power management of AC MGs based on concepts of microeconomics theory for market equilibrium. The prices of active and reactive energy are informed through the AC voltage parameters such as magnitude, frequency and angle. This approach allows several sources and loads to operate with no extra communication interface. Experiments are provided to validate operation in many different operational scenarios using a hardware-in-the-loop environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a contribution for sustainability, electric vehicles (EVs) are seen as one of the most effective influences in the transport sector. This paper proposes an improved voltage control of the EV operating as uninterruptible power supply (UPS) in smart homes. With the EV plugged-in into the smart home, it can act as an off-line UPS protecting the electrical appliances from power grid outages. The foremost advantages of the proposed voltage control strategy are comprehensively emphasized, establishing a comparison with the classical approach. Aiming to offer a sinusoidal voltage for linear and nonlinear electrical appliances, a pulse width modulation with a multi-loop control scheme is used. A Kalman filter is used for decreasing significantly the time of detecting power outages and, consequently, the transition for the UPS mode. The computer simulations and the acquired experimental results validate the proposed strategy in different conditions of operation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Series active power filters (APF) are an important solution to deal with power quality issues in weak grids under the presence of non-linear loads. The use of voltage feedback from the critical-load-bus (cload-bus) in the series APF allows for a control strategy that has performance and processing power advantages, when compared to other strategies in literature, but can cause saturation of injection transformers. This paper presents a control strategy that uses cload-bus voltage feedback with an additional control loop of the dc current in the output of the series APF voltage source converter (VSC), to avoid injection transformer saturation. The controlled dc current is additionally used for balancing the split dc-bus capacitors voltage in the VSC. The series APF and the proposed control strategy are modeled using small signal analysis for allowing controller design. Experimental results from a 3 kVA prototype are presented, with cload-bus voltage total harmonic distortion improving from 9% to 3% in each phase, while achieving the objectives of improved cload voltage waveform, controlled transformer dc current, and balanced dc-bus capacitors voltage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a simplified control technique for a dual three-phase topology of a unified power quality conditioner—iUPQC. The iUPQC is composed of two active filters, a series active filter and a shunt active filter (parallel active filter), used to eliminate harmonics and unbalances. Different from a conventional UPQC, the iUPQC has the series filter controlled as a sinusoidal current source and the shunt filter controlled as a sinusoidal voltage source. Therefore, the pulse width modulation (PWM) controls of the iUPQC deal with a well-known frequency spectrum, since it is controlled using voltage and current sinusoidal references, different from the conventional UPQC that is controlled using nonsinusoidal references. In this paper, the proposed design control, power flow analysis, and experimental results of the developed prototype are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]