Virtual Synchronous Generator and SMC-Based Cascaded Control for Voltage-Source Grid-Supporting Inverters

The voltage-source grid-supporting inverters (GSIs) are important to establish and support the frequency and voltage of a microgrid (MG) in both islanded and grid-connected modes. Traditionally, a cascaded control strategy that includes an external droop-based control loop and an inner proportional-integral (PI)-based voltage and current control loop is adopted to control a GSI, which barely shows inertia and limited control performance. In this article, a novel cascaded control strategy is proposed for a GSI. In the external loop, a VSG-based control strategy is adopted to increase the frequency stability of the MG, and a novel synchronization control method that does not use a complex PLL unit is proposed to satisfy the plug-and-play requirements of a GSI. In the inner voltage and current control loop, this article proposes an SMC-based vector control strategy which uses the fixed switching frequency and inherits the robustness and fast response speed of the SMC control. Both simulation and experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and improved performance of the proposed control strategy.