Stabilization of a Cascaded DC Converter System via Adding a Virtual Adaptive Parallel Impedance to the Input of the Load Converter

Connecting converters in cascade is a basic configuration of dc distributed power systems (DPS). The impedance interaction between individually designed converters may make the cascaded system become unstable. The previous presented stabilization approaches not only need to know the information of the regulated converter, but also have to know the characteristics of the other converters in the system, which are contradictory to the modularization characteristic of dc DPS. This letter proposes an adaptive-input-impedance-regulation (AIIR) method, which connects an adaptive virtual impedance in parallel with the input impedance of the load converter, to stabilize the cascaded system. This virtual impedance can adaptively regulate its characteristic for different source converters. Therefore, with the AIIR method, all the load converters can be designed to a fixed standard module to stably adapt various source converters. In addition, at any cases, the AIIR approach only changes the load converter's input impedance in a very small frequency range to keep the load converter's original dynamic performance. The requirements on the AIIR method are derived and the control strategies to achieve the AIIR method are proposed. Finally, considering the worst stability problem that often occurs at the system whose source converter is an LC filter, a load converter cascaded with two different LC input filters is fabricated and tested to validate the effectiveness of the proposed AIIR control method.