Comparison of Virtual Oscillator and Droop Controlled Islanded Three-Phase Microgrids

This paper compares transient responses of virtual oscillator control (VOC) to the conventional droop control method, under various inverter terminal voltage amplitude and frequency regulations. The system of interest is an islanded microgrid of three three-phase inverters sharing a resistive load. By letting the two controllers have similar steady-state droop characteristics, the virtual oscillator and droop controlled systems are compared in a small-signal framework with the aid of eigenvalue analyses. The analytical results are verified by simulating the two systems in MATLAB/Simulink. In the simulations, the third inverter in each system is connected to share the load when the other two inverters are already synchronized. Transients are compared by examining synchronization time after the third inverter is connected. The key finding is VOC outperforms droop control in terms of time responses when the terminal voltage frequency regulation range is allowed to be wide; otherwise, the droop control responds faster than the VOC technique. The same conclusions are found for two other load types: constant power load and nonlinear load. In addition, transient energy losses are investigated, which shows positive correlation with the time response.