Control Strategy and Impact of Meshed DC Micro-grid in the Middle East

Installation of micro-grid provides as viable solution to the problem of energy efficiency and environmental in the world; this is especially true for countries in the Middle East which have an abundance of natural sunlight. Recently, DC micro-grids have been a focus of numerous researches, and some industrial deployments are starting (Shenai et al. IEEE Power Electron. Mag. 3:42–48, 2016). The interest is due to several advantages in comparison to AC micro-grids in terms of efficiency, minimum number of devices, no need for frequency/phase control, modularity, and reliability. Moreover, it enables an easy integration of renewable energy resources, particularly photovoltaic ones. This study targets meshed DC micro-grid while most of literature papers concern radial DC micro-grids. It will bring several remarkable benefits: redundancy, better utilization of installed converters, flexible configuration, enhanced system reliability, and availability especially in case of line faults (Chen et al. IEEE Trans. Power Deliv. 31:1719-1727, 2016). In meshed DC grids, the control strategy of current or power becomes a critical issue particularly if a modular and generic solution is researched. The study focuses on the use of smart nodes controlling the power flow in the grid. The proposed control strategy is modeled and the simulation results are presented. A reduce scale tests based on DSPACE DS1103 have been provided to validate experimentally the proposed control scheme.