Sensorless Unbalance Modeling and Estimation as an Ancillary Service for LV Four-Wire/Three-Phase Power Converters

This paper describes a method to provide low-voltage four-wire three-phase power converters with the capability of unbalance estimation as an ancillary service to the main role that they play in the distribution system (distributed generator, energy storage system, drive, etc.). Typically, dedicated grid/load current sensors are needed to effectively comply with unbalance compensation tasks, increasing system cost and reducing reliability. This is due to the difficulties that arise in the extraction of the zero- and negative-voltage components from the voltages at the point of common coupling, such as the inadequate resolution of full-scaled voltage sensors and limited spectral separation. In this paper, the proposed method does not rely on additional sensors to those typically used in voltage-source converters, and in any case, those sensors are limited to the point of connection of the power converter. Impedance estimation only using converter-side current sensors is implemented by adding a high-frequency voltage excitation over the fundamental command. A new model approach is proposed for the real-time extraction of system impedance using a complex-valued compact form. Considering the voltage source at that frequency to be unique in the grid, it will be proved that the impedance and, thus, the resulting negative-sequence current, which is used for unbalance compensation, can be estimated. For the zero sequence, a special arrangement of the converter voltage sensors together with a repetitive controller is used.