Accurate Distributed Secondary Control for DC Microgrids Considering Communication Delays: A Surplus Consensus-Based Approach

The state-of-the-art dynamic consensus-based microgrid (MG) secondary controls suffer from the communication delay effect. Specifically, the system could not converge to the desired operating points with time-delayed communications. Such deviations are hard to detect in a decentralized manner and could destabilize the system. This paper proposes an accurate distributed secondary controller for DC MGs based on the surplus consensus algorithm. The proposed controller achieves accurate proportional power sharing and average voltage regulation among distributed generators (DGs) with the presence of variable and bounded communication delays. A surplus consensus-based observer is developed. The developed observer is proved robust against variable and bounded communication delays; it tracks the average of a group of dynamic states with zero steady-state deviations, which cannot be done using the conventional dynamic consensus-based observer. The convergence speed of the developed observer is analyzed and a parameter design procedure is presented. Moreover, the delay-dependent stability analysis of DC MG operation with the proposed secondary controller is derived. The marginal delay that leads the system to instability is calculated. At last, the performance of the proposed secondary controller and the developed stability analysis are validated under various scenarios using MATLAB/Simulink.