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This paper presents the design of a disturbance observer-based controller that regulates the output voltage of three-phase four-leg voltage source inverters (VSIs) deployed for grid-forming operation in Renewable Energy-based Distributed Generation (REDG) Systems. The primary objective of the controller is to provide a symmetric and sinusoidal voltage at the output of the VSI when supplying highly unbalanced and nonlinear loads. The controller employs the feedback linearization (FL) technique and incorporates a disturbance observer (DO) to address a range of disturbances that include oscillations resulting from unbalanced loads, harmonics generated by nonlinear loads, and non-oscillatory disturbances. Notably, the controller adopts a direct control scheme without the need for nested current control loops and does not use any transformation frames. Simulation studies and experimental investigations were conducted to assess the controller's performance under various load conditions, including both linear and nonlinear types, as well as load transients. The findings demonstrate the controller's capability to accurately track references while complying with the IEEE power quality standards for the tested conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hybridization of multiple energy sources is crucial for electric vehicles to deliver the same performance as modern fossil fuel-based automobiles. This paper presents a torque and speed control strategy for an electric vehicle DC traction motor by regulating the power flow from two energy sources, namely battery and supercapacitor systems, to resist unpredictable disturbances. A control system with three control loops is applied to regulate the speed of the traction motor. The outer speed control loop is a nonlinear state feedback controller with a disturbance observer, which is capable of handling non-linear systems with unpredictable disturbances. The inner voltage and current control loop are precisely tuned PI controllers. Using an adaptive energy management method that varies depending on the state of charge of the source, the total reference current needed to support the load demand is split between two sources. A laboratory prototype system model is generated, and the performance is analyzed under motoring and regenerative braking conditions. For monitoring and controlling the system, the dSPACE DS1202 real-time simulator is employed. The performance of the proposed control system is evaluated and it is found that the settling time to settle within a tolerance band of 1% is 0.75 s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nonminimum-phase property of the dc–dc boost converter can create difficulties in designing a stable, robust, and fast control for the output voltage. In this article, these difficulties are reduced by modifying the state model of the boost converter in such a way that it behaves like a minimum-phase system. More specifically, the control input entering the state equation for the output voltage is treated as an unknown disturbance to make the relative degree of the system equal the system’s order. As a result, the modified model does not exhibit zero dynamics, so that it can be treated as a minimum-phase system for the control design. The modified model is, then, used to derive a dynamic compensator for the output voltage regulation. More explicitly, the dynamic compensator is designed based on combining linearizing feedback control with a disturbance observer. The latter is employed to compensate for model uncertainties and unknown load with a view to ensure asymptotic regulation under the composite controller. The asymptotic regulation is achieved due to the integral action property characterizing the disturbance observer. More interestingly, after simple algebraic manipulation, it turns out that the composite controller reduces to a dynamic state feedback control plus an antiwindup scheme to mitigate the effect of control saturation during transients. The performance of the proposed controller is verified by experimental tests. The experimental results demonstrate the ability of the proposed controller to achieve good transient and steady-state performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite its advantages over its AC counterparts, DC microgrids present a lot of challenges. One of these challenges is the instability issues caused by constant power loads (CPLs). CPLs deteriorate the system's performance due to their incremental negative impedance characteristics. In this paper, a DC microgrid composed of a PV/battery system feeding a pure CPL was considered. A continuous-time model predictive control combined with a disturbance observer was applied to the DC–DC bidirectional converter. The purpose of the composite controller is to address the nonlinearity of the CPL and to maintain the stability of the system in a large operating region under load and PV generation variations. To show the performance of the system, several tests were performed under PV power and CPL power variations. Simulation results show good performance in terms of transient response, optimal tracking, and stability in a large operating region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents the design and experimental validation of feedback control along with a high‐gain observer to regulate the DC‐link voltage in dual‐stage grid‐tied photovoltaic (PV) system. In particular, the composite controller is designed to ensure accurate and fast control of the DC‐link voltage in response to abrupt changes in either the delivered active power or grid voltages. The high‐gain observer is employed to estimate the unknown disturbance, which is then cancelled by the feedback controller to ensure asymptotic regulation. Fast disturbance estimation is required to retain the nominal transient response specified under the feedback controller, which mandates using high‐observer gain. However, high‐observer gain magnifies the effect of the measurement noise, which results in poor steady‐state performances. This problem is addressed here by using a non‐linear gain to allow for on‐line adjustment of the observer gain. Specifically, a large observer gain is used during transients to ensure fast disturbance estimation, while a reduced observer gain is employed in the steady‐state regime to mitigate the effect of the measurement noise. Experimental results demonstrated the ability of the proposed controller to achieve accurate control, good transient response, fast disturbance rejection, and negligible sensitivity to the measurement noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new method to design a current controller for grid-tied inverters under both balanced and unbalanced grid voltage conditions. The proposed controller consists of combining a feedback-output controller with a disturbance observer (DO). The control design is carried out in the  $\alpha \beta$ reference frame. Thus, the objective of the composite controller is to ensure that the output of the system tracks a sinusoidal reference signal with zero steady-state error. A feedback controller only cannot achieve a good tracking performance because of the presence of model uncertainties and unknown disturbances. To account for the natural mismatch between the actual system and the mathematical model, the system dynamics are first augmented with an additional state-variable, representing the disturbance, and the feedback controller is designed based on the assumption that the disturbance input is available for feedback. Then, an observer is constructed to estimate the disturbance, which is assumed to be a sine wave oscillating at the grid frequency. Another feature of the DO is its ability to compensate for the effect of the saturation blocks required to limit the control input during transients, leading to improved dynamic performance. Several experimental tests were conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed controller, and the results demonstrated its capability to achieve accurate fast stable responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main advantage of the LCL filter in grid-tied converters is its ability to achieve a better harmonic mitigation in comparison with L filter. A proportional–integral (PI) regulator can be considered as a good candidate for controlling the LCL-filter system, as it is more convenient for real-time implementation. However, PI controller is not capable of stabilizing the grid-tied LCL -filter system when the resonance frequency of the LCL network is below a certain value that mainly depends on the sampling frequency. Such a problem can be overcome by adding an active damping (AD) to the PI controller. This paper presents the design, implementation, and performance testing of a stable PI current controller for a grid-tied inverter using LCL filter. The design process is based on combining feedback linearization (FBL) technique with a disturbance-observer-based control (DOBC). It turns out that the composite controller, consisting of FBL and DOBC, reduces to a PI current controller associated with a linear state-feedback control that plays the role of an AD. In addition, an antiwindup compensator arises naturally into the controller when considering the limits on the control input. An important feature of the proposed PI current controller is its ability to retain the nominal transient response achieved with state-feedback control even in the presence of model uncertainty and external disturbances. The proposed controller was verified through simulation and experimental tests. The results demonstrated the ability of the controller to provide good transient and steady-state performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a robust continuous-time model predictive direct power control for doubly fed induction generator (DFIG). The proposed approach uses Taylor series expansion to predict the stator current in the synchronous reference frame over a finite time horizon. The predicted stator current is directly used to compute the required rotor voltage in order to minimize the difference between the actual stator currents and their references over the predictive time. However, as the proposed strategy is sensitive to parameter variations and external disturbances, a disturbance observer is embedded into the control loop to remove the steady-state error of the stator current. It turns out that the steady-state and the transient performances can be identified by simple design parameters. In this paper, the reference of the stator current is directly calculated from the desired stator active and reactive powers without encompassing the parameters of the machine itself. Hence, no extra power control loop is required in the control structure to ensure smooth operation of the DFIG. The feasibility of the proposed strategy is verified by the experimental results of the grid-connected DFIG and satisfactory performances are obtained. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A nonlinear predictive control (NPC) scheme in a cascaded structure for a permanent magnet synchronous motor drive is proposed. Taylor series expansion is used to predict the system response over a finite horizon. As NPC cannot remove completely the steady-state error in the presence of mismatched parameters and external perturbation, a disturbance observer is used to estimate the offset caused by parametric uncertainties and the load torque variation. In addition, input constraints (restrictions on the magnitude) are considered in the synthesis of the disturbance observer, resulting in an equivalent cascaded proportional integral action with an antiwindup compensator. The validity of the proposed controller was tested via simulation and experiment. Excellent results were obtained with respect to the speed trajectory tracking, stability, and disturbance rejection. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]