Electrical Power and Energy Systems 111 (2019) 447–458

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Electrical Power and Energy Systems

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijepes

Control strategy for inverters in microgrid based on repetitive and state T

feedback control
⁎
Wenjie Ma, Sen Ouyang
School of Electric Power, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou 510641, China

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

Keywords: As for an ac microgrid, it’s important to supply the loads with a sinusoidal voltage. However, due to the majority
Repetitive control of the loads being naturally nonlinear, when the microgrid is operating in the island mode, the output voltage of
State feedback the inverters is always deformed. To improve the total harmonic distortion (THD) of the output voltage, a control
Microgrid inverters strategy based on repetitive and state feedback control is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the state feedback
Total harmonic distortion (THD)
control is used to implement the pole assignment of the controlled object, i.e., the LC filter. By this way, the
resonance of the filter can be well suppressed. And the open-loop gain of the system is also increased in the low
frequency band, which can improve the system dynamics. Combined with this, the repetitive control is adopted
to ensure good steady-state control performance. Based on the sensitivity function and the regeneration spec-
trum theory, a parameter design method is proposed to simplify the design of a repetitive controller. Both
simulations and experiments are provided to demonstrate the good control performance of the proposed strategy
when supplying nonlinear loads in comparison to the PI controller. Moreover, the microgrid simulation results of
two inverters have been presented to validate the effectiveness of the designed control strategy.

1. Introduction been successfully applied to controlling dc-ac power inverters, such as

Nowadays, as an important form of power supply networking that
can give full play to the flexibility and advantages of the distributed
generation (DG), the microgrid has attracted much attention in recent
years [1–3]. Power electronic inverters are the main interface devices
for power exchange between DGs and microgrid. Therefore, ensuring
efficient and stable operation of the inverters is of great significance for
improving the operation of microgrid and promoting its development.
The majority of loads in microgrids are nonlinear. Together with the
voltage at the point of common coupling (PCC), the output voltage of
the inverters is always deformed by the load harmonic current when the
microgrid operates as an island, which may cause serious problems
regarding stability and reliability [4–6]. Therefore, it is of great prac-
tical significance to study the control strategy for reducing the total
harmonic distortion (THD) of the output voltage when supplying the
demand of nonlinear loads.
Among many control technologies, the control strategy based on the
proportional plus integral (PI) controller is widely used in the output
voltage control of microgrid inverters [7,8]. Though the structure of PI
controller is simple to implement, it has limitations for harmonic sup-
pression [9,10]. The proportional plus resonant (PR) controller can
realize zero-steady-state error tracking of sinusoidal signals [11]. It has
[12,13]. Based on this, the strategy consisting of a set of resonant
controllers is proposed to reduce the THD of the output voltage for the
uninterruptible power supply when serving nonlinear loads [14]. Al-
though a system equipped with well-tuned multiple resonant con-
trollers shows perfect performance of rejecting harmonics, the de-
termination of a large number of parameters is a difficult task.
Moreover, compared to others, this kind of controller requires much
more DSP resources [15]. Due to the characteristics of simple structure
and strong robustness [16], the application of the sliding mode control
to the control of the inverter output voltage is studied by many re-
searchers [17], which ensures that the system is well resistant to load
disturbances while maintaining a good dynamic response. Nevertheless,
the chattering problem in the digital implementation of the sliding
mode control is unavoidable [18]. A droop control strategy is proposed
in [19] to share the load harmonic power, which can reduce the THD of
the inverter output voltage to a certain extent. However, it is necessary
to know the impedance type at each harmonic frequency to determine
the selected droop control equation. To address this problem, a har-
monic droop control strategy is presented in [20]. But the design of the
control coefficients is more complex.
The repetitive control based on the internal model principle can
realize the precise tracking of periodic signals, and can effectively

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail address: ouyangs@scut.edu.cn (S. Ouyang).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijepes.2019.04.002
Received 8 March 2019; Received in revised form 1 April 2019; Accepted 5 April 2019
Available online 23 April 2019
0142-0615/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
W. Ma and S. Ouyang
suppress the periodic disturbance [21], so it is widely used in control of
inverters [9,12]. In [22], the repetitive controller is applied to the
voltage harmonic mitigation of the inverters in island microgrid, and a
design method of the lead unit in repetitive controllers is proposed to
take comprehensive consideration of control accuracy and the system
stability margin. However, due to the inherent hysteresis property of
repetitive control, the response speed of the system is slow. In order to
further enhance the robustness of the system, a combined controller of
repetitive control and sliding mode control is presented in [23], assisted
by feedforward control to improve dynamics. Nevertheless, to get good
tracking accuracy and resonance suppression of the LC filter, the design
of the phase advance unit and the low-pass filters is more complex. In
order to reduce the number of parameters to be considered in the de-
sign, a method based on the H∞ control theory is proposed in [24,25]
to obtain the stabilizing compensator, which can guarantee the ex-
ponential stability of the repetitive control system. But the compensator
with excellent performance is always higher-order and its im-
plementation is complicated. Also, in [15], an approach based on the
mixed sensitivity is used to design the repetitive controller. But the
selection of the weighting functions is not easy. It should be noted that
the condition [9,26] employed for the system stabilization design in
[22,23] is a sufficient condition, which means that the stability margin
of the designed system cannot be evaluated. It’s pointed out in [27] that
the regeneration spectrum is suitable for simplifying the system stabi-
lization design and analyzing the stability margin of the repetitive
control system. On this basis, a design method for the repetitive con-
troller based on regeneration spectrum is shown in [28], and the ef-
fectiveness of the method is verified by simulation and experimental
results in an active power filter system. It is worth to point out that
there are few experiment results available in literature showing cases of
regeneration spectrum applied to the output voltage repetitive control
of microgrid inverters.
The inverters are always connected to the microgrid via LC filters.
At the resonance frequency, the controlled object, i.e., the LC filter,
with a phase lag nearly 180 degrees shows a large resonance peak,
which leads to the poor stability of the system [29]. Therefore, a good
suppression of the filter resonance is important for improving the
control performance of the repetitive control system. The passive
damping method of series resistor in the circuit is adopted in [24,25],
thereby increasing the power loss [30,31]. To avoid this problem, the
way of adding digital filters into the control loop is used in [22,23] to
suppress the resonance peak. However, the active damping method of
adding low-pass filters and notch filters requires accurate information
of the system parameters (such as the filter resonant frequency). Thus,
it’s sensitive to the parameters changes.
To mitigate the output voltage harmonics when serving nonlinear
loads, a control strategy based on the repetitive and state feedback
control is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the inductor current and ca-
pacitor voltage of the LC filter are selected as state variables to perform
pole assignment of the controlled object, namely, the LC filter. Through
the state feedback, the resonance of the filter can be well-suppressed
without extra power loss. And this way is relatively insensitive to the
parameter perturbations. Combined with the state feedback control, a
voltage repetitive controller with good steady-state control accuracy
and stability is designed based on the sensitivity function and re-
generation spectrum. Both simulation and experimental results are
given to demonstrate the excellent performance of the proposed control
strategy of reducing the inverter output voltage THD when supplying
nonlinear loads. Furthermore, a microgrid simulation model is built to
verify its effectiveness in parallel operation of inverters.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows. The basic control
structure of microgrid inverter is introduced in Section 2. And the de-
sign of the proposed control strategy and the analysis of stability and
robustness are illustrated in Sections 3 and 4, respectively. Section 5
gives the simulation and experiment results.
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Electrical Power and Energy Systems 111 (2019) 447–458
Fig. 1. Architecture of an islanded low-voltage microgrid.
2. Basic control structure of the microgrid inverter
An islanded microgrid composed of multiple DG units is shown in
Fig. 1. The DG is usually equipped with an energy storage device to
supply high-quality power to loads. Therefore, it is assumed that the
DC-side voltage of the inverter, denoted as vdc , remains a constant in
this paper.
Usually, the control system of microgrid inverters can be divided
into a power layer, a control layer and a PWM hardware layer [32]. The
common algorithms used to generate the voltage reference in the power
layer mainly include the droop control and the virtual synchronous
generator (VSG) control. The control loop, which regulates the output
voltage with no steady-state errors, and the virtual output impedance
loop together constitute the control layer. In the low-voltage microgrid,
the P-U and Q-f droop control can better achieve the decoupling control
between active power and reactive power [33].
Based on the aforementioned discussion, the overall control block
diagram of the inverter designed in this paper is shown in Fig. 2.
In Fig. 2, vx (x = a, b, c) represents the inverter-side output voltage.
The measured signals ix and vox are the inductor current and the output
voltage, respectively. iox is the current injected into the microgrid. The
LC filter inductance and capacitance are denoted as L and C. Rl is the
equivalent series resistance of the filter inductor, and Rc is that of the
filter capacitor. P and Q are the measured average active power and
reactive power respectively. E∗ and ω∗ are the nominal voltage and
frequency. The droop coefficients are defined as kp and kq, respectively.
The state feedback coefficients are represented as k1 and k2. Rfi and Lfi
are the resistance and inductance of the feeder, and their values are
generally small.
As shown in Fig. 2, the pole assignment implemented by state
feedback of the controlled object, i.e., the LC filter, is carried out to
change its frequency characteristics. The repetitive control is used to
achieve high steady-state control accuracy and enhance the ability to
resist the harmonic interference. And the dynamic response speed of the
system is further ensured by the feedforward control. Because the
control model in each coordinate α or β is the same and decoupled [34],
the single-phase control model of the LC filter is taken as an example for
explanation in the following design process. In this work, the design of
voltage control is mainly concerned. Details about the droop control
and the virtual impedance technique can be found in [32,33,35].
W. Ma and S. Ouyang Electrical Power and Energy Systems 111 (2019) 447–458

Fig. 2. Control block diagram of the microgrid inverter.

3. The voltage control strategy

3.1. Design of the state feedback control

The SVPWM block together with the inverter can be modeled by

using an average voltage approach. So the SVPWM block and the in-
verter bridge can be ignored when designing the controller [25]. Con-
sidering a balanced three-phase system, the controlled object P of the
single-phase model of the LC filter is shown in Fig. 3.
From Fig. 3, the transfer function from vx to vox can be expressed as

vox (s ) CR c s + 1
G0 (s ) = =
vx (s ) LCs 2 + (Rl + R c ) Cs + 1 (1)

On the basis of the system parameters, the Bode plot of G0 (s ) is

shown in Fig. 4.
It’s obvious in Fig. 4 that the underdamped system exhibits a large
resonance peak at the resonant frequency with a lag phase close to Fig. 4. Bode plots of G0 (s ) and Gp (s ) .
180 degrees, which means the stability of the system is very poor. In
order to improve the frequency characteristics of the controlled object,
the filter inductor current i x and the output voltage vox are selected as
the state feedback variables, and the designed state feedback control is

Fig. 5. Diagram of the controlled object with state feedback control.

Fig. 3. Diagram of the controlled object P.

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W. Ma and S. Ouyang Electrical Power and Energy Systems 111 (2019) 447–458

shown in Fig. 5. 5
Td ⩾
Then, the transfer function from vx to vox can be rewritten as |α max | (8)

vox sCR c + 1 ln(R (ωi ))

Gp (s ) = = αi ≅
vx LCs 2 + (Rl + R c + k1 R c + k2 ) Cs + 1 + k1 (2) Td (9)

Assume the poles of the controlled object with state feedback con- in which α max is the zero point’s real part of P (s ) , and αi is the real part
trol be of dominant pole of the system.
Therefore, the dominant poles can be expressed as
s1,2 = −ξωr ± jωr 1 − ξ 2 (3)
ln(R (ωi ))/ Td ± jω (10)
where ξ and ωr are the desired damping ratio and natural angular where ω ∈ (0, ∞) .
frequency. Thus, some conclusions can be derived:
Combining the system characteristic equation determined by (3)
with (2), the corresponding expressions of the two state feedback (a) To design a stable system, the condition that R (ω) < 1 should be
coefficients can be obtained as satisfied.
2 (b) If (8) is met, the stability margin of the system can be estimated by
⎧ k1 = ωr LC − 1
the degree of between R (ω) and 1.
⎨ k2 = 2ξωr L − ωr2 LCR c − Rl (4)
⎩
In this paper, the desired damping ratio and natural angular fre- More details are provided in [27,36,37].
quency are set to ξ = 0.6 and ωr = 6600 . Then, according to (4), the The unity feedback closed-loop system only with pole assignment is
state feedback coefficients are as follows shown in Fig. 6(a). The system sensitivity function is defined as
1
S0 (s ) =
⎧ k1 = −0.78725 1 + Gp (s ) (11)
⎩ k2 = 5.7502
⎨ (5)
The characteristic equation of the system in Fig. 6(b) is given by
The Bode plot of the controlled object after pole assignment, i.e., the
frequency characteristic of Gp (s ) , is shown in Fig. 4. From Fig. 4, the 1 + Gp (s ) − K q (s ) e−(T − τ1) s = 0 (12)
advantages of the state feedback control can be concluded as follows: Based on the aforementioned discussion, the regeneration spectrum
function of the system in Fig. 6(b) is defined as
(1) Eliminate the resonance peak completely and improve the phase
margin of the system; R (ω) = |K q (jω) S0 (jω)| (13)
(2) Increase the system open-loop gain in the low-frequency band, Let ‖S0 (s )‖∞ = Ms and |S0 (jωs )| = 1(‖·‖∞ denotes the H∞ norm of the
thereby, improving the dynamics and the steady-state tracking ac- transfer function) as shown in Fig. 7.
curacy. Since ‖K q (s )‖∞ = 1, a condition to ensure R (ω) < 1 is given by
|K q (jωs )| < 1/ Ms (14)
3.2. The repetitive control
In this paper, K q (s ) is selected as a second-order low-pass filter with
Usually, the load current iox contains a large number of harmonic the transfer function as follows
components. As shown in Fig. 6(b), in order to further enhance the
ωq2
ability to reject harmonic interference, the repetitive controller is K q (s ) =
adopted to improve the steady-state control performance of the system. s2 + 2ξq ωq s + ωq2 (15)
In Fig. 6, K q (s ) is a low-pass filter to ensure the system stability. e−sT where ωq is the cut-off frequency of the filter and ξq is the damping
is a delay link, and Tis the base period of the reference vref . e sτ1 is the
coefficient, which is set to ξq = 2 /2 . Therefore, according to (14), the
lead link.
upper limit of ωq can be calculated by
2
3.2.1. Design of the low-pass filter K q (s ) 2 2 2
⎛ ωs − 2ξq ωs ⎞ ωs 4 ωs 2 − 2ξq2 ωs2
Firstly, a brief introduction of the regeneration spectrum theory ωq < ⎜ M −1 ⎟
2
+ 2
−
s Ms − 1 Ms2 − 1
[27,28] is presented to help understand the design method. ⎝ ⎠ (16)
Considering the continuous time-invariant system with a single-
delay, assume its characteristic equation is
3.2.2. Design of the lead link e sτ1
P (s ) + Q (s ) e−sTd =0 (6) Based on the sensitivity function, the parameter design can take into
the trade-off among the control accuracy and stability of the control
where Td is the delay time. system [15,28]. So this paper adopts the sensitivity function in the
Accordingly, the regeneration spectrum function of the system is design of the lead link e sτ1.
defined as From Fig. 6(b), the sensitivity function of the system is expressed as
Q (s ) Sγ (s ) = S0 (s ) X (s ) (17)
R (ω) =
P (s ) (7)
in which
The closed-loop system keeps stable on the condition that R (ω) < 1 1 − K q (s ) e sτ1 e−sT
and all the zero points of P (s ) are in the left half part of the complex X (s ) =
1 − S0 (s ) K q (s ) e sτ1 e−sT (18)
plane. This is a sufficient but non-essential condition, which means the
regeneration spectrum function cannot be used to estimate the absolute Lemma 1 gives a sufficient condition for choosing the parameter τ1
stability margin of the system. Fortunately, this issue was addressed in to reduce the magnitude of the sensitivity function at the harmonic
[27]. frequency of kωn (ωn is the base angular frequency of the reference)
Systems satisfying (8) have the characteristic stated as (9) [38].

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Fig. 6. Control Block diagrams. (a) The unity feedback closed-loop system only with pole assignment. (b) A repetitive controller is plugged in the system in (a). (c)
The proposed voltage control strategy in this paper.

|Sγ (jkωn )| ⩽ |S0 (jkωn )||X (jkωn )| ⩽ |S0 (jkωn )|, ∀ kωn < ωq (22)

It can be derived from (22) that the magnitude of the sensitivity

function defined in (17) can be reduced by the reasonable design of τ1 at
all harmonic frequencies within the bandwidth of K q (s ) . Thereby, the
ability of the system to reject harmonic interference can be improved.

3.2.3. Design of the phase advance compensator e sτ2

According to the above analysis, the bandwidth of K q (s ) is limited to
ensure the system stability. In order to further improve the tracking
performance for the signals with frequencies smaller than ωq , a phase
Fig. 7. The frequency response of K q (s ) and S0 (s ) . advance compensator is plugged into the system in Fig. 6(b).
The characteristic equation of the system in Fig. 6(c) is as follows
Lemma 1. For a ωq satisfying (16), if there exists a positive constant τ1 such 1 + Gp (s ) + K q (s ) e sτ1 [e sτ2 Gp (s ) − Gp (s ) − 1] e−sT = 0 (23)
that θl (kωn ) ⩽ δ1 (kωn ) ⩽ θu (kωn ), ∀ kωn < ωq , then |X (jkωn )| ⩽
1, ∀ kωn < ωq , where and the regeneration spectrum function is

δ1 (ω) = arg[K q (jω) e jωτ1] (19) R (̂ ω) = |K q (jω) S0̂ (jω)| (24)

where
Im[S0 (jkωn )]
θu (kωn ) = tan−1
1 − Re[S0 (jkωn )] e sτ2 Gp (s )
S0̂ (s ) = 1 −
1 + Gp (s ) (25)
⎡ (1 − |S0 (jkωn )|2 )/2 ⎤
+ cos−1 ⎢
1 2Re[ ( )] | ( )|2 ⎥
⎣ − S0 jkω n + S 0 jkωn ⎦ (20) Then the sensitivity function of the system in Fig. 6(c) is given by

Sγ̂ (s ) = S0 (s ) X ̂(s ) (26)

Im[S0 (jkωn )]
θl (kωn ) = tan−1
1 − Re[S0 (jkωn )] in which
⎡ (1 − |S0 (jkωn )|2 )/2 ⎤ 1 − K q (s ) e sτ1 e−sT
− cos−1 ⎢
2 ⎥ X ̂(s ) =
⎣ 1 − 2Re[S0 (jkω n )] + |S 0 (jkωn )| ⎦ (21) 1 − S0̂ (s ) K q (s ) e sτ1 e−sT (27)

Lemma 2 gives a sufficient condition for choosing the parameter τ2

[38].
Therefore, according to Lemma 1, for a positive constant τ1 sa-
tisfying the condition, there is Lemma 2. If there exists a constant τ2 satisfying that

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W. Ma and S. Ouyang Electrical Power and Energy Systems 111 (2019) 447–458

θl2 (kωn ) ⩽ ωτ2 (defined as δ2 (ω)) ⩽ θu2 (kωn), ∀ kωn < ωq , then Table 1
Parameters of the inverter.
‖K q (s ) S0̂ (s )‖∞ < 1 (28)
Parameters Value
and
LC-filter inductance, L/mH 0.75
LC-filter inductance, C/ μ F 6.6
1 − K q (jkωn ) e jkωn τ1 e−jkωn T
|X ̂(jkωn )| = <1 Equivalent resistance, Rl /Ω 0.1
1 − S0̂ (jkωn ) K q (jkωn ) e jkωn τ1 e−jkωn T (29) Equivalent resistance, R c /Ω 0.05
Switching and sampling frequency, f/kHz 20
where DC voltage, vdc /V 400

θl2 (kωn ) = −arg[T0 (jkωn )] (30)

|T0 (jkωn )| ⎤
θu2 (kωn ) = cos−1 ⎡ − arg[T0 (jkωn )]
⎣ 2 ⎦ (31)

T0 (s ) = 1 − S0 (s ) (32)

It can be derived from (29) that

|Sγ̂ (jkωn )| = |S0 (jkωn ) X ̂(jkωn )| ⩽ |S0 (jkωn )||X ̂(jkωn )| ⩽ |S0 (jkωn )| (33)

Then, from (24), (28), and (33), it can be concluded that the closed-
loop system in Fig. 6(c) is not only stable, but also the tracking error is
lower than that of the system in Fig. 6(b).
Consequently, the design procedure of the proposed voltage control
strategy shown in Fig. 6(c) is presented in Fig. 8.
Fig. 9. Frequency response of S0 (s ) .

4. Solution of control parameters and system performance

analysis
4.1. Solution of control parameters
Parameters of the inverter are listed in Table 1. Based on these
parameters, the frequency response of S0 (s ) is plotted in Fig. 9. It can be
derived that ωs = 12, 100 rad/s and Ms = 1.97 . Then, calculated by (16),
the upper band of ωq is 9210 rad/s. In this paper, the value of ωq is set to
9000 rad/s.
For the sake of simplicity, both τ1 and τ2 are selected as integer
multiples of the sampling period τ0 (50 μs in this paper). Suppose
τ1 = a1 τ0 and τ2 = a2 τ0 . The plots of δ1 (ω) with different values of a1 and
those of δ2 (ω) with different values of a2 are shown in Figs. 10 and 11,
respectively.
From Fig. 10, when a1 is taken as 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7, respectively,
the phase plot of δ1 (ω) satisfies the condition described in Lemma 1. In
order to choose a better value of a1, a simulation model of the system in
Fig. 6(b) is built. For a sinusoidal input signal with a frequency of 50 Hz
and an amplitude of 1, several tests are carried out with different values
of a1. According to the tracking performance, the value of a1 is finally set
to 4. Similarly, the simulation model of the system in Fig. 6(c) is also
built, and a2 = 2 is finally determined by the same method.

4.2. Analysis of system stability and control performance

Assuming continuous values for L and C inside the range 0.54 mH to

0.94 mH and 4.6 μF to 8.6 μF, the changes in values of R ̂(ω) , which is
the regeneration spectrum function of the system in Fig. 6(c), is shown

Fig. 8. The design flow of the proposed voltage control strategy. Fig. 10. The plots of δ1 (ω) with different values of a1.

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W. Ma and S. Ouyang Electrical Power and Energy Systems 111 (2019) 447–458

Fig. 11. The plots of δ2 (ω) with different values of a2 .

Fig. 13. Bode plots of G (s ) and Gd (s ) .

Fig. 14. Schematic diagram of the simulation model.

Fig. 12. System stability analysis.

in Fig. 12.
It can be observed from Fig. 12 that when the parameters of the
inverters vary in a large range, the maximum value of R ̂(ω) is always
less than 0.5, which proves that the designed voltage repetitive control
system has a large stability margin.
The transfer function from vref to vox in Fig. 6(c) and that from iox to
Fig. 15. Circuit topologies of loads used in the simulation.
vox are denoted as G (s ) and Gd (s ) , respectively. Fig. 13 shows the Bode
plots of them.

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Fig. 16. Simulation results of Strategy I.

Fig. 17. Simulation results of Strategy II.

Fig. 18. Microgrid simulation model consisting of two inverters.

Fig. 13(a) shows that the magnitude of G (s ) at the fundamental, 5th,
and 7th harmonics is close to 0 dB, and the phase angle is also close to
0, which means that the control system can realize zero-steady-state
error tracking of the voltage reference. And it can be concluded from
Fig. 13(b) that the magnitude of Gd (s ) at the fundamental frequency and
low-order harmonics, e.g., the 5th and 7th, is far less than 0 dB.
Therefore, the designed control system has a good ability to reject
harmonic interference.
5. Simulation and experiment
5.1. Simulations
As shown in Fig. 14, a PSCAD simulation model is built to verify the
effectiveness of the designed control strategy. Referring to [15], con-
trast tests with the conventional PI controller (Strategy I) have been
carried out to demonstrate the outstanding performance of the designed
control strategy (Strategy II) of improving the inverter output voltage

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W. Ma and S. Ouyang
Fig. 19. Harmonic analysis of the output voltage in simulations.
Fig. 20. Experiment result with PI controller.
Fig. 21. Experiment result with repetitive controller.
THD when serving nonlinear loads. In this part, the voltage reference is
fixed at 100 V (the amplitude).
Three kinds of loads are used in the tests, and the circuit topologies
of loads are shown in Fig. 15.
The simulation results are shown in Figs. 16 and 17. In each wa-
veform, the red line is for the phase A output voltage, and the black line
is for the load current.
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Electrical Power and Energy Systems 111 (2019) 447–458
Fig. 22. THD of the output voltage in experiments.
Fig. 23. The experiment setup.
Table 2
Parameters of the droop control.
Parameters Values
Nominal frequency and voltage E ∗ = 105 V, ω∗ = 313.8 rad/s
Droop coefficient kp = 0.0026, kq = 0.0028
Power filter cut-off frequency ωf 1 = 300 rad/s, ωf 2 = 135 rad/s
Fig. 19 shows the harmonic analysis results of the output voltage in
each case. It can be observed from Fig. 19 that under the linear load,
both the PI controller and the repetitive controller exhibit good per-
formance of tracking the voltage reference with a low THD of the
output voltage. The performance of the PI controller under highly
nonlinear load is shown in Fig. 16(c), where the harmonic effect of
nonlinear current with THD of 28.32% almost deforms the output
voltage with THD of 3.91%. The result with repetitive controller is
shown in Fig. 17(c). Here, it can be easily observed that the THD in
voltage waveforms is almost negligible (THD = 2.11%) despite of
highly nonlinear load current with THD of 28.64%. Therefore, it can be
concluded that the harmonic voltage is reduced more effectively with
the efforts of the repetitive controller.
5.2. Experiments
To further verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme, three ex-
periment tests have been carried out in a laboratory setup (based on the
TMS320F28335, as shown in Fig. 23) to demonstrate the effectiveness
of the designed control strategy. The experimental conditions are the
same as that of simulations. The waveforms of the output voltage in
load case 3 are shown in Fig. 20 and 21, and the THD of the output
voltage is presented in Fig. 22.
Based on the experiment results, the THD of the output voltage with
PI controller and repetitive controller is 2.35% and 4.22% (the voltage
THD needs to be maintained below 5% [20]), respectively. It can be
W. Ma and S. Ouyang Electrical Power and Energy Systems 111 (2019) 447–458

Fig. 24. Simulation results of the proposed strategy in parallel operation. (a–g) Are the results under load condition A, and others are the results under load condition
B.

concluded that the designed repetitive controller shows better perfor-

mance of rejecting harmonic interference, which is nearly accordance
with the simulation results. It should be pointed out that the THD of the
output voltage in the experiment is slightly larger than that in simu-
lation due to the influence of some factors such as the digital control
delay and the dead time in the PWM module.

5.3. Parallel operation simulations with repetitive controller

In microgrid, during parallel operation, the voltage loop of the in-

verter must maintain synchronism and keep stability with the re-
maining system. Therefore, the proposed control strategy is tested for
Fig. 25. Circuit topologies of the load used in the parallel operation simulation. parallel operation. A microgrid consisting of two inverters is shown in
Fig. 18, where the parameters of the two inverters are the same (listed

456
W. Ma and S. Ouyang
in Table 1) and the rated power is both set to 2.5 kVA. The standard
feeder impedance in low voltage microgrid is 0.642 + j 0.083 Ω/ km [39].
On this basis, the impedance of Feeder 1 is set to 0.1284 + j 0.0166 Ω
(with the length of 200 m) and the same is Feeder 2.
Initially, only Inverter 1 is connected to loads. At 0.5 s, Inverter 2 is
interconnected immediately. As shown in Fig. 25, two kinds of load are
used in the simulations.
Parameters of the droop control are listed in Table 2. Fig. 24 shows
the simulation results. The voltage at the PCC is denoted as Upcc . And the
currents (supplied to loads) of Inverter 1 and Inverter 2 are represented
as i1 and i2 . The circulating current iH between the two inverters is de-
fined as iH = (i1 − i2)/2 .
From Fig. 24(g) and (l), it’s obvious that the circulating current
between the two inverters is close to zero in the steady-state whether
the load is linear or nonlinear. The load power is well shared. After
interconnection to the microgrid, Inverter 2 can keep cooperative op-
eration well with Inverter 1. Due to the sharing of the distorted load
current, the THD of Upcc has decreased. Fig. 24(i) shows that the PCC
voltage is nearly sinusoidal (with a THD nearly 1.3% after Inverter 2
put into operation) despite of the nonlinear load current with THD of
28.56%.
6. Conclusions
In this paper, a control strategy based on repetitive and state feed-
back control is designed for inverters in microgrid to improve the THD
of the output voltage. Through theoretical analysis and experimental
verification, the following conclusions can be drawn.
(1) The regeneration spectrum theory is used to design the voltage
repetitive control system so that not only the system stabilization
design can be simplified, but also the absolute stability of the
system can be estimated. Theoretical analysis shows the designed
control system has a large stability margin, and the good control
performance of the proposed strategy has been demonstrated by
simulations and experiments when supplying nonlinear loads in
comparison to the conventional PI controller.
(2) The adoption of state feedback control can reduce system power
loss when compared with the passive damping method. And it in-
creases the design flexibility of assigning the poles of the controlled
object at the desired position to suppress the resonance of the LC
filter and improve the control performance.
(3) The presented simulation results of a microgrid have demonstrated
the effectiveness of the proposed strategy in parallel operation of
inverters.
Declaration of interests
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influ-
ence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgement
This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of
Guangdong Province, project number 2016A03-0313476.
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