A PQ Control strategy for Voltage-Controlled

Inverters Applied in Low-Voltage Power System

Yang CHEN Jinbin ZHAO Keqing QU Fen LI
College of Electric Engineering
Shanghai University of Electric Power
Shanghai, China
zhaojinbin@shiep.edu.cn

Abstract—Voltage-controlled inverters are grid-friendly and can line impedance as pure reactive. However, the R/X ratio of the
cope with the high penetration caused by connecting a lot of distributed system transmission line is usually so big, and the
distributed generations. In low voltage power systems This droop control method is not precise at all. Distribution line
paper proposes a simple and precise PQ control strategy based impedance is usually resistive. Thus the usual droop control
on improved voltage-controlled inverters with inner output method is not accurate. Recently, inverters that mimic
impedance. The PLL part is replaced by second order synchronous generators [2-3] are raised (synchronverter) and
generalized integrator method and it performs well when became a hot topic. Synchronverters can adjust grid voltage
frequency varies. The effectiveness of the proposed control amplitude and frequency for higher penetration.
strategy is validated by theoretical analysis and simulation
results. Reference [3] has proposed a single-phase VCI with
controllable inner output impedance. The voltage source and
Keywords-- single-phase inverter, PQ control strategy, SOGI output impedance can be controlled accurately by setting
PLL, voltage-controlled inverter certain control parameters. The output impedance of the VCI
is a virtual one and doesn’t consume any energy or occupy a
large place. The control idea is excellent, but its frequency
I. INTRODUCTION control is complex and coupled with voltage amplitude
control. And the PLL part doesn’t perform well in imperfect
Modern society depends on fossil energy heavily ，but circumstances. This paper improves the PLL part, uses second
fossil energy speeds up global climate change by emitting order generalized integrator method to decouple frequency
large amounts of environmental pollutants such as CO2, NOx, and amplitude control and proposes a simple and precise PQ
SO2 gases, etc. In order to reduce carbon emissions, protect control strategy with resistive transmission line impedance.
world environment and satisfy increasing energy demand, We will talk about the operation principles of the whole
renewable energy sources such as solar power and wind power
system in Part Ⅱ. Simulation results are shown and analyzed
are applied and increasing fast. Those renewable energy
sources are connected to the public-utility grid by dc-ac in Part Ⅲ. Conclusions are given in Part Ⅳ.
converters (also called grid-connected inverters). The
performance of inverters determines the power quality to the II. OPERATION PRINCIPLES
local load and the grid. A. Principle of PQ control
Current paradigm of wind and solar power generation is to
extract the maximum power from the power source and inject
it into the power grid. Any random power fluctuation of the
renewable power generators will be compensated by
conventional synchronous generators. As penetration grows
up with more and more distributed generations, the safety and
stability of the whole grid is threatened. Toshiba analyzes the
main problems as below [1]: 1) difficulty in managing
distribution-line voltage caused by inverse power flow, 2)
frequency variation and distribution-line voltage fluctuation
caused by power flow fluctuation. Aiming at these problems, Fig. 1. Equivalent circuit of inverter control strategy.
voltage controlled inverters (VCIs) are proposed and
become a new and hot research focus. Usually VCIs use P-f Reference [3] tells that the inverter can have equivalent
and Q-V droop control method which regards transmission circuit indicated in Fig.1. vco and Li represent equivalent
Supported by Shanghai Green Energy Grid Connected Technology
Engineering Research Center (Grant No. 13DZ2251900), Shanghai Talent
Development Capital Projects (Grant No. 2012024) and Innovation Program
of Shanghai Municipal Education Commission (Grant No. 13ZZ132).

978-1-4799-6768-1/14/$31.00 ©2014 IEEE

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controllable voltage source and equivalent impedance. These vp is calculated by (11), and its formula can be written as
two can be controlled with great accuracy. below.
Rsp is the transmission line impedance and is usually so 4 T2 + t
T ∫t
small that the output impedance is determined almost by the v p (t ) = 2 ES sin ωs t cos θi dt
control parameters (Ri). δ means the phase angle difference
between equivalent voltage source and grid voltage. δ is 4 2 T
1
usually very small, and the equations sinδ ≈ δ and cosδ ≈ 0 are = ES ∫ 2 [sin(ωs t + θi ) + sin(ωs t − θi )]dt (6)
satisfied. From Fig.1, the power flow from inverter to grid can T 0 2

be calculated as below: The phase shift between the inverter electromotive force
Vg (Vco −Vg ) and the inverter filter voltage vfil hereinafter we call φi. Finally,
P= (1) φi is deduced.
R
VcoVg ωs
Q=− δ (2) ϕi ≡ lim(θi (t ) − ωs t ) = lim s(θˆi (s) − )
R t →∞ s →+0 s2
Equations (1) and (2) indicate that active power can be
ωCO + 2π K f 2K mu 2V2∗ ωS
controlled by changing the value Vco-Vg. Reactive power can = − (7)
be controlled by coordinating δ. The accuracy of PQ output is (1 − Kmu 2 ) 2 ES (1 − Kmu 2 ) 2ES
determined by R (=Ri+Rsp) and the control of vco, vg and δ. In the case of no load operation, the electromotive force
Commonly, inverters use big physical grid-connected equals the filter voltage. Therefore, the angular frequency in
inductance to get precise, but this method greatly increases the case of no load is given as below.
inverter size and costs, and the voltage drop and burden on the
transmission line will also increase. The impedance of ωS = ωCO + 2 2πK f K mu 2V2∗ (8)
transmission line is resistive, and the usual method will get
coupled P and Q. Ri in [3] is a virtual one without any physical
burden and can be precisely controlled. Proposed PQ strategy Lp Lsp K
is precise because vco, Ri and δ all can be controlled accurately.
Vdc vfil isp
B. PQ calculation and frequency control
vg
Details of proposed PQ control strategy are shown in Fig.
2. The Phase-locked Loop (PLL) is a grid voltage phase
detection module that makes use of an orthogonal voltage to vp,vq
PWM
get the information of grid phase, frequency and amplitude. ip,iq
The Synchronous Reference Frame PLL(SRF-PLL) applied in
[3] is easy, but it has two disadvantages listed as below: 1) to θi
Δ(t) vp
SRF-PLL itself, it performs badly in the conditions of
frequency variations and harmonic disturbances [5]; 2) when it
is connected with the voltage-controlled strategy [3], it makes
formula of ωs complex and coupled with voltage amplitude.
Here we use second order generalized integrator method to
decouple frequency and amplitude control and proposes a
simple and precise PQ control strategy with resistive Fig. 2. Details of proposed PQ strategy.
transmission line impedance.
The calculation of PQ is given according to Instantaneous
Reactive Power Theory:
1
P = (v p i p + vq iq ) (3)
2
1 (4)
Q= (vq i p − v p iq )
2 Fig. 3. Details of second order generalized integrator method

For the part 2), a simple expression of ωs is deduced here.

Assume that the inverter is connected to a big power grid and
the filter voltage vfil is expressed in (15).
(5)
v fil (t ) = 2 ES sin ωs t
Here, Es is voltage RMS value and ωs is the grid angular
frequency [rad/s]. Fig. 4 droop control method

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 The control strategy can be integrated with droop control
method so that it can take part in power quality management.
The details of P-V droop control are shown in Fig.4, if switch
S is closed, the droop control is enabled. The Q-f droop
control can be realized in the same way.
voltage difference changed a little to sustain output P to be
800W. And PQ both settled down in less than five circles after
change of PQ reference ended. At the end of the two changing
processes, PQ reference and PQ output matched very well.
And the system is steady without any big peak in frequency.

III. SIMULATION RESULTS As shown in Fig.6&7, reactive power nearly unchanged

when active power changed from full load to half load in 0.2s.
To verify the proposed strategy, a simulation model based Furthermore, active power also didn’t change obviously when
on Fig.2 has been carried out in Matlab/Simulink. The solver reactive power increased from 0Var to 800Var in 0.2s. The
was ode45 with a maximum step size of 1μs. The main two figures showed that the coupling effect between the real
parameters are in table I. power and reactive power was very small. This also means the
coupling effect between voltage amplitude and frequency is
TABLE I. PARAMETERS OF SIMULATION very small. Compared with the same process in [6], proposed
PQ strategy was much simpler and performed better in the
Vdc (V) Lp (mH) Lsp (mH) Rf (Ω) Cf (μF) f0 (Hz) coupling effect. Especially when reactive power (Q) changed,
320 5 0.3 0.5 26.4 50 proposed strategy can still sustain active power (P) stable at
the P reference.
tf (ms) Kf Kmu2 V1base* (V) V2base* (V) ωco (rad/s)

1 0.2 0.5 200 0 314

The system responses are shown in Fig.5. Rated power of

the simulation system is 1kW. The black lines are PQ
references and the red dotted lines are PQ outputs. The whole
system started at t=0. From t=0s to 0.6s, it’s the time for initial
synchronization which is not shown in Fig.4. The
synchronization process includes setting Pref=0 and Qref=0 and
turning on circuit breaker when combination condition is
satisfied.

Fig. 6. Coupling effect of PQ output (a).

Fig. 5. Simulation results of PQ output.

At t=0.8s, a ramp change of active power from 0W to

800W in 0.2 seconds happened. When Pref changed, voltage
amplitude responded quickly to change the difference between Fig. 7. Coupling effect of PQ output (b).
vco and vg, and the P output follows the command well. At the
same time the frequency also changed to sustain output Q to
be 0Var. At t=1.3s, a ramp change of reactive power from
0Var to 800Var in 0.2 seconds happened. When Qref changed,
the control system coordinated the amplitude of V2* to increase
output reactive power. As the same to P process, system

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Fig. 8. Simulation results of vfil vs isp.
The results of vfil and isp are shown in Fig. 8. vfil was scaled
down to 1/20 so that it can match the scale of isp. vfil always
remained sinusoid no matter PQ references changed or not. isp
remained stable without any peak when the references of P or
Q changed.
Fig. 9. Output current of the inverter in constant PQ value.
The output current of the inverter in constant PQ value is
shown in Fig.9. The total harmonic distortion (THD) is about
1.29%. The output current in transient process is also quite
smooth. The voltage remains sinusoid during the whole
process. The quality of power is pretty good.
IV. CONCLUSIONS
A PQ control strategy based on voltage-controlled inverter
which can behave like a synchronous generator in some
aspects was proposed. For the disadvantages caused by using
SRF-PLL, this paper made relative improvement measures
and overcame them. The inverter was changed to meet the
environments of low voltage power systems. The effectiveness
of the proposed control strategy was validated by results of
simulation, which showed that the control of output PQ was
simple, precise and quick. The power equality is good and
satisfies the standard of IEEE.
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