Case Study of Active Disturbance Rejection Control Approaches for MVDC Microgrids

Power-electronics-based Medium Voltage Direct Current (MVDC) power systems, consisting of several interconnected feedback-controlled switching converters, suffer from potential degradation of stability induced by negative incremental resistances due to the presence of constant power loads (CPLs). To tackle such a problem, system-level stabilizing control methods were proposed based on Active Disturbance Rejection Control (ADRC). Unfortunately, the research landscape in the power electronics field focuses so far only on the cases where the method achieves outstanding performance and this may give the sensation that ADRC would be a plug and play solution. The contribution of this paper is that different methods of observer and control combination are evaluated on same benchmark system and their performance is assessed.