逆变器控制

Design and Control for LCL-Based Inverters with Both Grid-Tie and Standalone Parallel Operations Chien-Liang Chen, Jih-Sheng Lai, Yu-Bin Wang, Sung-Yeul Park, and Hide Miwa

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Future Energy Electronics Center

415 Whittemore Hall, Blacksburg, VA 24061-0111, USA

jlchen99@, laijs@, ybwang@, supark@, and hmiwa1@

Abstract—The inductor-capacitor-inductor (LCL) filter allows higher noise attenuation and universal output in which a power conditioning system or an inverter can operate in both grid-tie and standalone modes. In this paper, the LCL filter design considerations including sensor position selection and component selections are discussed for single-phase paralleled inverters operating in both grid-tie and standalone modes. For grid-tie mode operation, each inverter is operating under a single current loop with proportional-resonant controller and admittance path compensation to reduce the steady-state error by providing a high gain at the fundamental frequency. For standalone mode operation, one of the inverters is implemented with a dual-loop controller to regulate the output voltage while the rest inverters operate in single current-loop controller with communication channels in between to ensure the uniformity of current sharing. Both the simulation and experimental results verify that the designed controllers are capable of paralleling inverter operation in grid-tie and standalone modes by adapting to different controller settings while keeping the same hardware setup.

Keywords-LCL filter, grid-tie inverter, dual-loop control, PR controller, parallel inverter, admittance compensation.

I.I NTRODUCTION

The parallel inverter systems have demonstrated many advantages compared to a single high-power inverter [1-8]. For example, an inverter can be designed in modular manner which allows the system capacity to be multiplied and the reliability can be greatly improved with redundancy. Parallel inverter operation has been a major topic in uninterruptible power system (UPS) applications where the design is focused on the standalone operation, and the output stage is typically an inductor-capacitor (LC) filter. When connecting the paralleled inverters to utility grids, the capacitor becomes redundant, and thus either a pure inductor (L) or an LCL filter can be used as the inverter output stage. Compared with the L filter, the LCL filter is more attractive [9] because it can not only provide higher high-frequency harmonics attenuation with the same inductance value, but also allow the inverter to operate in both standalone and grid-tie modes, which makes it a universal inverter for distributed generation applications such as fuel cell and photovoltaic power conditioning system (PCS).

Major factors that were used in LCL design considerations include inductor current ripple magnitude and reactive power consumption in capacitor [10], the range of LCL resonant frequency, and the total inductance value of LCL filter [11]. In this paper, the sensor position selection and the universal application in both grid-tie and standalone modes are added as the LCL design factors.

The compliance of interconnect standards IEEE 1547 and 1547.1 [12,13] and their current harmonic limits can also be used in the LCL design criteria. However, the cause of inverter harmonic distortions were mainly found in nonlinear effects such as nonlinear device voltage drop, dead time, limited PWM resolution and lack of stiffness in dc link [14]. The controller with high gain at the harmonic frequencies such as proportional-resonant (PR) controller [15] and direct-quadrant (DQ) frame current controller [16,17] can be potential candidates to alleviate such harmonic distortions.

In addition to harmonic concerns, the controller design for parallel inverter systems must consider stability and steady-state error issues. In general, parallel inverters are designed in standalone mode for UPS and distributed generation (DG) systems that supply regulated output voltages when grid is not available. Most reported standalone inverter systems use a LC filter and proportional-integral (PI) controller in their control loops [18-20]. In [18,19], multiple feedback loops were proposed to improve the output voltage performance and to damp the poles of LC filter. In [20], feedback, feed-forward, and nonlinear controls were considered for the entire UPS control system. These parallel inverter systems, however, are usually designed with LC filter [1-8] which will have difficulties in grid-tie operations due to the undetermined resonant frequency caused by the change of grid-side source impedance [21]. The design of parallel inverters also needs to consider the current sharing capability [5-6] and the communication [7-8] among paralleled inverters. In [5], some current-sharing schemes for parallel inverter systems including master-salve control, current-limit control, and circular-chain control are examined and compared. In [6], a current-weight-distribution control was proposed to allow inverters in parallel with different output current capability. In [7], the controller area network (CAN) communication interface is utilized in a parallel inverter system to obtain a higher reliability. In [8], a new voltage and frequency droop control for parallel inverter systems is proposed to allow a robust current sharing without communication between inverters.

In this paper, the paralleled inverters adopt the LCL filter as the output stage to allow the inverter to operate in both grid-tie