A Compact Interlinking Converter Modular for Hybrid AC/DC/DS Microgrids with a Decentralized Power Management Strategy

This paper presents a compact interlinking converter modular (ICM) for hybrid ac/dc microgrids with a distributed storage (DS) bus for storage integration. The proposed ICM for hybrid ac/dc/ds microgrids employs the nine-switch topology with compact design and reduced number of active switches, which structurally equivalents to provide a dc port for dc subgrid interconnection, an ac port for ac subgrid interconnection, a ds port for ds subgrid interconnection, and two dc-dc converters for the interconnections of parallel DSs. In addition to the well-known advantage of components saving, the proposed ICM, aggregating different interlinking converter cells (ICC) into an ICM, is also able to share measurements from all ICC sensors to improve the overall modular performance without establishing additional communication links between interlinking converter cells. With this in mind, a decentralized power management strategy is developed by means of a coordination control methodology to systematically manage various distributed generations (DGs), DSs, and ICM in a decentralized manner with enhanced communication fault ride-through capability. The performance of the proposed ICM application in hybrid ac/dc/ds microgrids and the effectiveness of the associated decentralized power management scheme have been validated by controller hardware-in-the-loop (CHIL) experiments in a real-time digital simulator (RTDS) system.