Hill Climbing Power Flow Algorithm for Hybrid DC/AC Microgrids

Microgrids are becoming popular because of the rise of distributed energy resources (DERs). The quest for efficient utilization of DERs resulted in the development of hybrid dc/ac microgrids, which consist of independent dc and ac subgrids. Controlling the power exchange across hybrid microgrids is an important aspect in maximizing the benefits. There are numerous techniques proposed in the literature to control the power flow; however, most of these techniques use proportional-integral controllers which are difficult to tune and exhibit slow response. To eliminate the drawback of existing control solutions, this letter proposes a novel strategy to exchange active power among dc and ac microgrids. The proposed control strategy is based on the hill climbing algorithm that uses perturbations of power angle δ and observes the corresponding changes in the active power. An average model of the hybrid microgrid is first developed for the evaluation of the proposed algorithm. The proposed algorithm is then applied to verify its effectiveness for achieving sufficient power exchange and enhancing the dynamic response. The model is implemented and tested using MATLAB/Simulink. Moreover, the proposed control strategy is experimentally validated using a real-time simulator, OPAL-RT.