Advanced Load Shed and Predictive Ramp Rate Control of a Medium Voltage AC/DC Testbed

Like the electrical grid, shipboard power systems have historically relied on oversized generators to reliably supply their load(s) with very little integration of real-time sensing and control. Redundant generation is employed in case of an outage and loads are often shed uncontrollably when generation capacity is exceeded. Employing a distributed zonal power system architecture that is designed like a microgrid offers many benefits that are being widely studied by the naval power system community. In such a topology, multiple generation sources buffered with energy storage, regulated using power electronics, are employed and a significant degree of sensing and control are used to operate them all in the most reliable and efficient manner. The control algorithms employed play a vital role in a successful implementation and these must be studied in collaboration with representative hardware topologies. In the work presented here, a medium voltage (MV) AC/DC testbed that is in place at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) is being used to study robust control algorithms that are being developed and modeled by Clarkson University (CU). The testbed emulates one zone of a multi-zone power system and CU has developed algorithms intended for optimized shedding of loads and the ramp rate support of a generator supplying transient loads. The testbed and its integration with these control strategies will be presented along with experimental results collected to date.