Fixed-order loop shaping robust controller design for parametric models to damp inter-area oscillations

Abstract The inter-area oscillations are common in power systems and can occur due to the changes in the load or generating power especially in long transmission lines. This paper presents the design of a robust fixed-order loop shaping controller to damp out the inter-area oscillations and to enhance the stability of the power system. The proposed loop shaping method is based on the shaping of the open-loop transfer function in the Nyquist diagram through minimizing the quadratic error between the actual and the desired open loop transfer functions in the frequency domain. The proposed method is robust with respect to multi-model uncertainty. Despite other robust controller design methods, the proposed approach deals with the entire system i.e. there is no need to reduce the system and still leads to a lower order controller. In addition, most of the robust methods are heavily dependent on selecting some weight filters which is not required in the proposed approach. This method is applied to the two-area four-machine system and 68 bus system and the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method in damping inter-area oscillations are validated using case studies.