A Nonlinear Adaptive Stabilizing Control Strategy to Enhance Dynamic Stability of Weak Grid-Tied VSC System

Large scale renewable energy systems interfaced with voltage source converters (VSCs) experience several challenging issues when integrated to weak grids. One of the specific issue i.e. control loop interaction of vector-controlled VSC under high grid impedance leads to several instability mechanism ultimately resulting in unwanted tripping of the VSC unit. As a countermeasure, a unique nonlinear adaptive stabilizing control (NASC) technique has been proposed in this paper to enhance the dynamic stability of the VSC during such scenarios. A small-signal model is developed first to examine the instability mechanism of VSC connected to weak grids under abnormal operating conditions and varying set points of the power controller. The dominant modes are identified from the analysis and a stabilizing controller is developed based on adaptive dynamic surface control philosophy for enhancing its stability. The proposed controller has been proved to be uniformly ultimately bounded using Lyapunov analysis. Besides, the stabilizing mechanism of VSC is analyzed with the proposed controller by performing small-signal stability analysis of the entire system. The efficacy of the proposed control scheme is demonstrated by performing numerical simulations in MATLAB 2017a and conducting experimental validations in controller-hardware-in-the Loop (CHIL) platform.