Stability Robustness for Secondary Voltage Control in Autonomous Microgrids With Consideration of Communication Delays

The future extensive usage of open communication networks for secondary voltage control in autonomous microgrids (MGs) inherently introduce time delays, which would degrade the system performance or even cause instability in the worst case. However, existing literatures have largely ignored these communication delays between the microgrid central controller and primary local controllers. To fill the knowledge gap, this paper proposes an analytical method to determine the stability robustness of secondary voltage control in MGs by taking into account the communication latency effect. Based on static output feedback, a closed loop small-signal model of an MG installed with proportional-integral secondary voltage controllers is first derived. Delay-dependent criteria are then formulated to detect the stability posture of MG system by tracing critical eigenvalues and cluster treatment of characteristic roots, in the forms of delay margin for a single delay and stability tableau over the delay domain for multiple delays, respectively. By a series of trial declarations, the qualitative impact of secondary controller gains on system stability regions against uncertain delays is investigated, from which it can be observed that generally the increase of integral gains would yield to a less delay-dependent stability of control system and the results can be utilized to guide the controller design for a compromise between the dynamic performance and stability robustness. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is verified by a simulation study.