Hybrid isochronous-droop control for power management in DC microgrids

This paper presents a new approach for generation source management in a dc microgrid, which uses a hybrid isochronous-droop (HID) control strategy to overcome the inherent drawbacks of traditional droop control and achieve a performance more towards that which can be achieved by communication-based distributed or centralized control schemes. In particular, the approach allows the number of dc sources in operation to be readily reduced at light loads, sources to be dispatched in defined priority order as load increases, and better voltage regulation to be achieved without requiring communication-based secondary control. However, since the strategy still retains the simplicity and flexibility of a traditional droop scheme, non-dispatchable and dispatchable sources controlled using traditional droop control can still be easily included into the microgrid operation. The power management and voltage regulation performance of the proposed HID scheme has been validated for different operating scenarios of the considered dc microgrid.