This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been
fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TSG.2017.2712658, IEEE
Transactions on Smart Grid
Autonomous Voltage Regulation and Current
Sharing in Islanded Multi-inverter DC
Microgrid
Qiang Yang, Member, IEEE, Hailin Zhao, Hongmei Zeng
 load dynamics and intermittent nature of RES generation. As a
Abstract-- This paper presents an autonomous voltage control
solution in islanded dc microgrid in a decentralized fashion. The
dc bus voltage is regulated cooperatively by multiple renewable
energy sources (RES) and energy storage units (ESUs) in
different operation modes, automatically without relying on
underlying communication. Unlike the existing droop control
based solutions that deal with the trade-off between bus voltage
regulation and current sharing, we present a state-of-charge (SoC)
based current sharing method through the incorporation of SoC
and capacity information into the double closed-loop control for
ESUs. This effectively eliminates the dc bus voltage deviation, and
simultaneously guarantees the SoC balance among individual
ESUs. In addition, an off-MPPT algorithm is proposed for RES to
manage their output generation for cooperatively maintaining the
bus voltage stability in the case that the generation-demand
balance cannot be regulated by ESUs alone. The suggested
solution is assessed through a set of simulation experiments for a
range of operational scenarios and its effectiveness is confirmed
by the numerical results.
Index Terms-- autonomous voltage control, dc microgrids,
current sharing, DG, ESUs.
I. INTRODUCTION
I N most recent years, the Microgrid, a small-scale power
system interconnecting a number of distributed generators
(DGs), energy storage units (ESUs) and various loads is
considered as an efficient paradigm and attractive solution to
make use of dispersed small-scale renewable energy sources
(RES), e.g. photovoltaics (PV), micro wind turbines and
CCHPs [1-3]. Moreover, dc microgrid has received increasing
interests, in particular the small-scale commercial and
residential applications, as the management challenges of
frequency, phase, reactive power as well as the
synchronization and harmonics in ac microgrids do not exist in
dc based microgrids. This significantly reduces the design,
reinforcement and operational complexity of the integrated
energy systems with renewable generators [4-6]. However, the
penetration of a massive number of renewable DGs in the
microgrids still brings direct challenges in protection,
regulation and management of the islanded system, due to the
This work is supported in part by Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science
Foundation of China (LZ15E070001).
Q. Yang (corresponding author), H. Zhao and H. Zeng are with the
College of Electrical Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China
310027 (e-mail: qyang@zju.edu.cn).
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1
result, the energy storage units (ESUs) are considered
indispensable to participate in maintaining the voltage stability
as well as for leveraging the generation-demand balance in
islanded dc microgrids [7].
It should be highlighted that it is critical to coordinate
integrated RES and ESUs in order to regulate and maintain the
dc bus voltage, as well as ensure the dynamic generation-
demand balance within the islanded microgrid [8-10]. In fact,
the islanded microgrid may operate in different conditions and
the bus voltage needs to be appropriately regulated
automatically to minimize voltage deviation by the support of
RES and/or ESUs. In addition to meet the premise of bus
voltage stability, reasonable current sharing amongst
individual ESUs is required to guarantee the state-of-charge
(SoC) balance among ESUs to avoid the overuse of certain
ESUs, and hence protect their lifetime [11-13].
To cope with such technical challenges in dc microgrid
management, much research effort has been made in
addressing this issue from different aspects [8-22]. In [15], a
centralized control approach combining the gain-scheduling
control and centralized fuzzy control has been proposed
aiming to achieve voltage regulation as well as the current
sharing among distributed ESUs. The implementation of such
centralized control paradigm firmly relies on a central
controller which carries out the regulation functionalities
through the real-time feedback signals, from the controlled
terminals via underlying communication [13-16]. This imposes
obvious scalability limitations as the communication
overheads and availability may significantly degrade the
overall control performance and the operational complexity
can be prohibitive, hence its deployment in microgrids with a
massive number of dispersed DGs and ESUs may be
impractical. To this end, the management functions
implemented in a decentralized fashion were exploited, i.e.
control decision-making is carried out locally with the partial
information at the individual components independently with
minimal requirement of communication [17-22]. Without the
stringent communication requirements, the control
malfunctions due to the failures of communication or terminals
are effectively avoided; and the scalability in managing
enormous geographically dispersed generation and storage
units is significantly promoted.
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Transactions on Smart Grid
In addition, with respect to the control strategy, the
voltage/current (V/I) [10, 19-20] or voltage/power (V/P) [12,
21-22] droop control as well as various extended methods
which generally require no information exchange via
communication were exploited for management of dc
microgrids. The mode-adaptive decentralized control
paradigm for managing dc microgrids with multiple renewable
DGs and ESUs was presented in [8]. This approach provided
more control flexibility than conventional dc voltage droop
control, however, the energy balance among ESUs was not
studied. In [10], the authors exploited a decentralized control
method to elaborate the fuzzy logic theory and V/I droop
control to adaptively regulate the bus voltage as well as the
current sharing among a set of ESUs in a PV-based microgrid.
It was implemented through adjusting the virtual resistance of
droop controllers in accordance with the real-time SoC
information of individual ESUs and the dc bus voltage
deviation. In [19], an adaptive droop control strategy for load
sharing and circulating current minimization in low-voltage
standalone dc microgrid was presented. In particular, this work
confirms that the load current sharing performance can be
affected by the converter cable resistance, which needs to be
included into the control solution design. Also, [12] presented
a SoC-based adaptive V/P droop control approach whose
droop coefficient is inversely proportional to the nth order of
SoC to ensure the SoC balance among connected ESUs.
The aforementioned studies indicate that the best trade-off
between the voltage control and current sharing among ESUs
is a non-trivial task. For most existing solutions, the control
functionalities need to be underpinned by communication
between converters, and the bus voltage deviation can be
indispensable after carrying out control actions. This may be
problematic for managing dispersed RES and ESUs under
certain circumstances (e.g. unavailability of communication
infrastructures, stringent voltage requirements of loads or the
connected measurement/control intelligent devices). This
paper attempts to further address the technical challenge of
efficient bus voltage regulation and current sharing in the
context of islanded dc microgrid consisting of multiple PV
generators and ESUs.
The key technical contributions made in this paper can be
summarized as follows: (1) a decentralized autonomous bus
voltage control solution requiring no underlying
communication is presented for islanded dc microgrid
consisting of geographically dispersed PV and storage units
with diverse capacities; (2) a SoC-based current sharing
method is incorporated into the control paradigm considering
the existence of different converter cable resistances. Unlike
the droop control solution, the dc bus voltage deviation can be
eliminated, and the SoC balance among ESUs can be
simultaneously guaranteed; and (3) an off-MPPT algorithm is
adopted to control the PV output generation for dc bus voltage
regulation in the case that the ESUs alone cannot fulfill the
control functionality. The performance of suggested control
solution is assessed through a set of simulation experiments for
a range operational scenarios and its effectiveness is confirmed
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2
by numerical result.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: the
operation of dc microgrid is overviewed in section II; section
III proposed the autonomous control of voltage regulation and
current sharing in dc microgrid with dispersed PVs and ESUs;
section IV assesses the performance of the proposed solution
based on simulations for a range of operational scenarios;
finally, the conclusive remarks are given in section V.
II. CONFIGURATION AND OPERATION OF THE DC MICROGRID
Fig. 1 illustrates an islanded dc microgrid consisting of
geographically dispersed renewable energy sources (RES) (e.g.
PVs, WTGs), ESUs (batteries, super-capacitors) and loads
(linear and non-linear loads) which are connected in parallel to
dc bus through appropriate power converters. In such islanded
dc microgrid, coordination control among the renewable DGs
and ESUs is required to maintain the bus voltage stability
under various operational dynamics.
Fig. 1: Islanded parallel-connected multiple inverter dc microgrid.
In this work, the dc microgrid consisting of a set of
dispersed PVs and battery-based ESUs with different
capacities and initial SoC statuses, as well as varying power
loads is considered. Since no underlying communication
channels are provided amongst these converters, the decision-
making and control actions are carried out autonomously by
individual components based on local information. In the
microgrid operation, the stability of dc bus voltage needs to be
maintained through appropriate control of two entities: the
distributed ESUs and PVs. Such regulation can be
implemented in two different operational modes as follows:
A. Operational mode 1
In this mode, the ESUs are responsible for the voltage
regulation of the dc bus as long as the charging/discharging
limitations are not reached. The ESUs are capable to balance
the power in the microgrid, and hence regulate the bus voltage,
through discharging/charging process. In this case, the RESs
(e.g. PVs) can operate at the maximum power point tracking
(MPPT) mode to maximize the output power generation, and
the converters of ESUs are operated under the SoC-based
adaptive current sharing for power balancing amongst different
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Transactions on Smart Grid
3

ESUs simultaneously to avoid over charging or discharging. Udc≥1.02Udc_ref

B. Operational mode 2
In this mode, the RES participates in the dc bus voltage Mode 1 MPPT Off-MPPT Mode 2
regulation, as all the ESUs are not allowed for absorbing more
power, i.e. reach their limitations of SoC, and hence they are
not capable to regulate the dc bus voltage alone. In this case, Udc＜Udc_ref
the RES needs to be switched to the off-MPPT mode so as to
Fig. 3. Transition process between MPPT and off-MPPT for PVs
reduce the output power generation whilst meeting the
requirement of load demand, and hence help to regulate the III. SOC-BASED ESU ADAPTIVE CURRENT SHARING CONTROL
bus voltage to the referenced value. AND PV OFF-MPPT CONTROL

C. Transition between modes In the dc bus, multiple PVs and ESUs are connected in
parallel, and the control structure of the proposed voltage
In this work, the transition between the two aforementioned
regulation solution is illustrated in Fig. 4, including the SoC-
modes is determined based on the dc bus voltage U dc , as
based adaptive current sharing controller for buck-boost
illustrated in Fig. 2. It is considered that once the bus voltage converter and MPPT/off-MPPT controller for boost converter.
exceeds a predefined proportion of the reference bus voltage
U dc _ ref ( U dc  1.02U dc _ ref is adopted in this study), the A. SoC-based adaptive current sharing in ESUs
In the converter, an autonomous dc bus voltage adaptive
microgrid operation switches from mode 1 to mode 2. In the
regulation approach incorporating the state of charge (SoC)
case that the bus voltage U dc＜U dc _ ref , the operation is
information into the double closed-loop control is adopted.
switched to mode 1. As the proposed control solution is This ensures the ac bus voltage to be accurately maintained at
carried out autonomously at individual components (i.e. ESUs the reference value, simultaneously minimize the difference of
and PVs), the control decision-making is made merely based SoC among distributed ESUs, which effectively avoids the
on the local information and the common dc bus voltage, deep charging or over-discharging in certain ESUs.
without communication between parallel-connected converters. The proportional-integral (PI) based control has been
Similar philosophy of mode switching is adopted in [10], while widely adopted in microgrids for various management
our solution implements different control functionalities (e.g. functionalities, e.g. voltage control and frequency stabilization,
ESU current sharing and PV off-MPPT control). due to its low complexity in implementation and configuration
Udc 1.02Udc_ref (e.g. [10]). In this work, the PI controller is used in voltage
regulation to minimize or eliminate the bus voltage deviation
RES (MPPT) RES (off-MPPT)
from the reference voltage. The proposed controller for the
Mode 1 Mode 2 bidirectional dc/dc buck-boost converter is driven by the
ESU (Current ESU (Charging
complementary pulse width modulation (PWM) of ESUs. As
sharing control) limited control) the ESUs need to work in both discharge and charging
Udc＜Udc_ref
processes, the converter needs to act as either a boost or buck
Fig. 2 Transition process between two operational modes. converter for different scenarios, respectively, and ST2 can be
controlled through the complementary PWM wave with ST1.
It is noted that the ESUs participate in the bus voltage
The controller consists of an external voltage control loop and
regulation for both modes (i.e. ESUs based regulation in mode
an internal current loop. The difference between U dc and the
1, and ESU-PV based regulation in mode 2), and hence the
converter control structure needs no alteration. For RES, the expected reference voltage, U dc _ ref , is made available to the
PVs are operated in either MPPT (mode 1) or off-MPPT outer PI controller to obtain the output current reference,
(mode 2). As the dc bus voltage U dc is the indicator of power I L _ nref , which acts as the input signal of the inner loop to
balance of the islanded system, U dc is adopted as the obtain the appropriate duty ratio for PWM signal, and hence
switching signal in the PV control loop. Fig. 3 illustrates the minimize the voltage deviation to be zero. The same
transition between two modes: in the case that the ESUs is in configurations of double closed-loop are adopted in individual
the charging mode, and the bus voltage U dc  1.02U dc _ ref , the ESUs (assuming that the same converter type is adopted for all
control of PVs is required to regulate the bus voltage through ESUs). From Fig.2, the output of the outer control loop can be
switching the PV from MPPT mode to off-MPPT mode. expressed as the following form: t
Conversely, the operation of PVs will be switched from off- U i*  k p (U dc _ ref  U dc )  kI  (U dc _ ref  U dc )dt (1)
0
MPPT to MPPT mode if the ESUs are in discharging mode or
where k p and k I are the proportionality and integral
U dc drops below the reference bus voltage (i.e. U dc＜U dc _ ref )
coefficient of the outer loop, respectively. In (1), if U i*  0 ,
due to PV operation in off-MPPT mode.
the ESU operates in the discharging mode (otherwise operates
in the charging mode).

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TSG.2017.2712658, IEEE
Transactions on Smart Grid
4

ESU_1 Buck-boost Boost

converter 1 converter 1 PV1

ESU_2 Buck-boost Boost

converter 2 converter 2 PV2
…… ……
Buck-boost converter n Boost converter m

L iL_n
ST2
io_n Re DC bus Rp D1 iL_m L iPV_m
PWM_n ie ip
udc Loads PWM ST1 u PV_m PVm
ESU_n Ub_n C1 ST1 C2 C

controller controller
Ui* i _nref
L PWM_n MPPT or Upv_refm
PI Kn PI comparator ST1 i _refm
Udc_ref off-MPPT PI
L
PI comparator
PWM
ST1
i
L_n algorithm
Uc2 ie R e * i
ip R p * L_m

*
Ui udc Ipv_m Upv_m Uc

Fig. 4 Control structure of the proposed voltage regulation in islanded dc microgrid (SoC-based adaptive current sharing of ESUs and MPPT/off-MPPT control of PVs)

The SoC status SoCn and SoC decreasing speed of the From (3) and (5), the current sharing among individual
th
n ESU SoCn ' can be determined by (2)-(4) [24]: ESUs during charging/discharging process can be expressed in
(7) and (8), respectively. It indicates that the current sharing
t

SoCn  SoCn (t 0) 

 0
 I L _ n dt
(2)
coefficient results in a positive correlation between SoCn ' and
Cn SoCn among individual ESUs in the discharging mode, i.e. the
dSoCn I L _ n ESUs with higher SoC discharge at a faster rate in maintaining
SoCn '   (3) the bus voltage stability. Conversely, SoCn ' is negatively
dt Cn
correlated with SoCn in the charging mode, i.e. the ESUs with
SoCmin  SoCn  SoCmax (4)
lower SoC charge at a faster rate. Consequently, the SoC states
where I L _ n ,  and Cn denote the output current, the battery
of ESUs will gradually tend to be equal for both
charging and discharging efficiency and the maximum capacity charging/discharging modes, and hence the power can be
of the nth ESU, respectively. appropriately shared among the distributed ESUs
In addition, the current sharing coefficient K n which automatically.
changes with the SoC states is incorporated into the double  I L _1 IL _ 2 IL _ n
closed-loop to coordinate the operations of ESUs. From (2)    
 C1e p SoC1
C2 e p SoC2
Cn e p SoCn
and (3), as the initial SoC of individual ESUs can be  (7)
different, K n can be determined by SoCn and capacity Cn  SoC1 ' SoC2 '

SoCn '
  p SoCn
 e p SoC1 e p SoC2 e
jointly so as to coordinate individual ESUs with appropriate
current sharing. Hence, the reference current I L _ nref for the  I L _1  eq SoC1 I L _ 2  eq SoC2 I L _ n  e q SoCn
   
inner control loop of nth ESU can be formulated in (5).  C1 C2 Cn (8)

 SoC1 ' e  SoC2 ' e   SoCn ' e
q SoC1 q SoC2 q SoCn


 I L _ nref  U i  K n It is worth noting that, the required time to reach SoC
 balance can be flexibly adjusted by configuring the parameters
Cn p ( SoCn  SoCmax  SoCc ) 
Kn  e (if U i  0, disch arg e) (5) p and q , e.g. the time can be reduced if p and q are
 Cmax
increased. Through the doubly closed-loop control with the
 Cn q ( SoCmin  SoCn  SoCc ) 
 Kn  e (if U i  0, ch arg e) SoC-based current sharing, the stability of dc bus voltage can
 Cmax be well maintained with current sharing among ESUs.
where p and q are the proportional constants, Cmax is the In this proposed decentralized control solution, as the PVs
and ESUs can be geographically dispersed in the dc microgrid,
maximum capacity of the batteries connected to the dc bus. In
the converter cable impedance needs to be considered. Here,
particular, SoCc is defined in (6) to act as a compensation to
different cable resistances Re and R p are introduced for
reduce the changing rate of K n in the case that the tracking
individual converters of PVs and ESUs, respectively (as shown
speed of controller falls behind to minimize the voltage in Fig. 4). The reactance is considered with little effect on the
deviation. steady-state control performance of the proposed solution in
t
 i

U dt low voltage dc micrgorid, and hence is not explicitly
SoCc  0 (6) considered, as similar to the existing solutions (e.g. [19], [23]).
Cmax

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In the controller design, virtual resistances, Re*  Re and and balances the system power rapidly by reducing the PV
R  Rp , for ESUs and PVs are adopted in the outer voltage
* generation drastically. The U pv will be reduced to  a  b  / 2 ,
p

control loop to compensate the voltage drop due to the line and the upper limit of the searching range is updated to
resistance as follows: b （a  b）/ 2 after this perturbation and the next perturbation
U dc _ ref  U c 2  ie Re*  U c 2  ie Re U pv (k  1) is set to the mean value of the updated range of


  *
 
(9)  a, b  if U dc  U dc _ ref . Such perturbation is repeated and the

U pv _ refm U c i p R p U c i p R p
upper limit is updated until U dc  U dc _ ref ; finally the lower
B. MPPT/Off-MPPT control of RES/PV limit is updated to a （a  b）/ 2 and S is set to 1;
The operation of connected PV generators needs to be (2) Fine tuning: following the coarse tuning, it attempts to
switched into off-MPPT from MPPT mode in the case that find the appropriate U pv to maximize the ESU utilization by
ESUs cannot regulate the bus voltage alone. Unlike the MPPT
increasing the PV generation tardily base on the search range
control, the aim of proposed off-MPPT control is to make the
operation of individual PVs deviate from their maximum of  a, b . Here, U pv  k  1 is set to  a  b  / 2 , after the
power points to reduce generation for voltage regulation. In voltage perturbation, the upper limit b is replaced by
this study, the voltage perturbation method combined with the  a  b  / 2 if U dc  U dc _ ref . Otherwise,  a  b  / 2 substitutes
successive approximation algorithm is adopted for PVs to
for the lower limit a . Such fine tuning is repeated until the
autonomously identify the appropriate PV output voltage, U pv ,
absolute difference u between two adjacent perturbations is
to achieve the power balance as well as the maximum
utilization of ESUs. The idea behind the off-MPPT control is less than a predefined value  ,which is sufficiently small to
as following: a larger voltage disturbance step is firstly applied indicate that the appropriate U pv has been identified.
for U pv to search for the general range of the target voltage,
then the voltage disturbance step is scaled down exponentially IV. SIMULATION EXPERIMENT AND NUMERICAL RESULT
upon every perturbation to incrementally reduce the searching This section assesses the performance of the proposed
range, until the target operating point is converged. control solution through simulation experiments for the dc
Fig. 5 illustrated that, a global variable S is introduced to microgrid consisting of three distributed lead-acid batteries
indicate if the PV generation is sufficiently small in off-MPPT (assuming constant charging/discharging efficiency of 0.95
mode. The initial S and closed search range  a, b are set to 0 during simulation) with different capacities and three PV
generators. The dc microgrid components and control
and 0,U pv _ 0  , respectively, where U pv _ 0 represents the algorithm are implemented based on Matlab/Simulink1 and the
sample of U pv when the PVs are switched from MPPT to off- simulation parameters are provided in Table I. The
performance evaluation is carried out through simulation for
MPPT mode, S  0 means the output power is still high in the five different operational scenarios, including load dynamics,
current search range, and the bus voltage U dc is introduced as transition between charging and discharging, dynamic ESU
an important criterion to search the target voltage since U dc is connection and disconnection.
TABLE I: SIMULATION PARAMETERS
the symbol indicating the power balance of the dc microgrid. Item Symbol Value Unit
In detail, the proposed off-MPPT control algorithm can be C1
Rated capacity of ESU 1 25 Ah
implemented through two steps:
Rated capacity of ESU 2 C2 12.5 Ah
Initialize
[a,b]=[0,upv_0]，S=0 Rated capacity of ESU 3 C3 20 Ah
Max. ESU discharging/charging I d _ max / I c _ max 100/50 A
Collect upv(k)、udc(k) current
Calculate uerr=udc(k)-udc_ref ESU nominal voltage Ub_n 380 V
∆u=upv(k)-upv(k-1)
PV output voltage at MPP U pv _ mpp 500 V
Y N (25 °C, 1000W/m2)
S=0?
PV output power at MPP Ppv _ max
Y N Y N 50 kW
uerr>0？ uerr>0？ (25 °C, 1000W/m2)
|∆u|≤ξ？ Y Rated dc bus voltage U dc _ ref 800 V
b =(a+b)/2 S=1 b=(a+b)/2
a=(a+b)/2 N
a=(a+b)/2 b=a
A. Case I: Load dynamics in discharging mode
We firstly look into the performance of the proposed
control solution in the condition that the ESUs support the
Calculate upv(k+1)=(a+b)/2 voltage regulation through discharging under load dynamics
(load increases from 195 kW to 215 kW at t  5 min )
Fig. 5: Flowchart of off-MPPT control algorithm for PVs.
1
(1) Coarse tuning: it firstly decreases U dc to the rated level The models and algorithmic codes of the simulated ac microgrid in
Matlab/Simulink are available upon request.

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considering the existence of different cable resistances. It is 100

assumed that three dispersed ESUs (with the initial ESU1
80 ESU2
SoC1  90% , SoC2  80% and SoC3  70% ) are connected to ESU3

SoC [%]
60
the dc bus via cables with the line resistances of Re1  2 ,
40
Re 2  1 and Re3  0.5 (these cable resistances are applied
20
to all simulations), respectively. In this case, the dc microgrid Load increases (+20 kW)
0
is operated in Mode 1, i.e. the ESUs are responsible for bus 0 5 10 15
Time [min]
voltage regulation through current sharing control, and the PVs (a)
maintain the MPPT generation. As shown in Fig.6 (a), ESU 2.5

SoC changing rate [%/s]

with higher SoC (i.e. ESU1) is observed with higher
2
discharging rate (i.e. decreasing speed of SoC) than other
ESUs. The maximum SoC difference among ESUs 1.5

( SoC  SoC1  SoC3 ) decreases from 20% to around 5% 1 ESU1

ESU2
during 0-5 min and gradually approaches to zero. Fig.6 (b) 0.5 ESU3
Load increases (+20 kW)
presents the SoC changing rates of ESUs under load changes 0
0 5 10 15
and shows that the SoC changing rate of ESU1 (i.e. SoC1 ' ) Time [min]
decreases, while others increases over the discharging process (b)
( SoC '  SoC1 ' SoC3 ' changes from 1.75% to 0.5% during ESU1
Output voltage of ESUs

dc bus voltage [V]

840 ESU2
the first 5 minutes); the changing rates of all ESUs increase ESU3
proportionally to meet the load supply requirement when the 820
dc bus

load increases from 195 kW to 215 kW at the time t  5 min . Compensation for voltage
deviation due to line resistance
In fact, ESU with higher initial SoC and capacity result in 800
larger current sharing coefficient, and hence contribute more Voltage drop Load increases (+20 kW) dc bus voltage
output current so as to achieve the balance among individual 780
0 5 10 15
ESUs. In addition, the ESU output voltage and dc bus voltage Time [min]

is examined. Fig.6(c) compares the output voltage of ESUs (if (c)

Fig. 6. Performance under load dynamics in discharging mode (a) SoC states
the cable resistances are not considered in controller design) of ESUs; (b) SoC changing rate of ESUs; and (c) ESU and dc bus voltage.
and the dc bus voltage, and highlights the voltage 90
Load decreases
compensation for individual ESUs. It indicates that the Load increases (-50 kW) ESU1
80
designed control solution can well compensate the effect of (+15 kW) ESU2
ESU3
SoC [%]

cable resistances in voltage regulation based on the introduced 70

Load decreases
virtual resistances. It shows that although a small voltage drop 60 (-25 kW)

at t  5 min is observed, the dc bus voltage can be well 50

maintained at the reference voltage of 800V. Discharging Charging
40
0 5 10 15 20
B. Case II: ESU charging/discharging transition Time [min]
(a)
In this case, three ESUs with initial SoC states
SoC changing rate [%/s]

of SoC1  90% , SoC2  70% and SoC3  50% are considered

Load decreases ESU1
2 (-50 kW)
ESU2
respectively. Fig. 7 presents the result of SoC states and 1 ESU3

changing rates of ESUs as well as the bus voltage under ESU Load decreases
0
charging/discharging transition. During t  0 ~ 10 min , the (-25kW)

-1
ESUs are operated in the discharging mode to support the Load increases
Discharging (+15 kW) Charging
regulation of dc bus voltage. As shown in Fig. 7(a) and (b), the -2
0 5 10 15 20
ESU firstly operates in the discharging mode and SoC changes Time (min)
in the same manner as in case I. At t  5 min (load increases (b)
from 175 kW to 190 kW), SoC1 , SoC2 and SoC3 start to 830
Load increases Load decreases Load decreases
820 (+15 kW) (-50 kW) (-25 kW)
dc bus voltage [V]

decrease and finally reach 48%, 47% and 42%, respectively at

t  10min . The ESUs are switched to the charging mode 810

(shaded area) at t  10min due to a load reduction of 50 kW, 800

790
and hence the SoC changing rates become negative (i.e. SoC
increases). At t  15 min , the load further decreases of 25 kW,
780
Discharging Charging
770
the control solution can adjust the charging rates to reach the 0 5 10 15 20
Time [min]
SoC balance among ESUs. Finally, Fig. 7(c) shows that the dc
(c)
bus voltage can be timely controlled to be maintained at 800V, Fig. 7. Control performance in charging/discharging transition (a) SoC states
although it experiences fluctuation due to load changes and of ESUs; (b) SoC changing rate of ESUs; and (c) ESU and dc bus voltage.
charging/discharging transition.

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TSG.2017.2712658, IEEE
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7

C. Case III: ESU disconnection/ connection dynamics 20

Difference of SoC [%]

p=2
In this case, the same simulation configurations (i.e. initial 15 p=5
p=10
SoC states of 90%, 70% and 50%, and load of 190 kW) are
10
considered and control performance is examined under the
condition of ESU disconnection and reconnection dynamics 5
(ESU2 is disconnected and reconnected to the dc bus at
0
t  5 min and 10 min, respectively). Fig.8 (a) and (b) shows 0 5 10
Time [min]
that the current can be appropriately shared throughout the (a)
simulation, which confirms the effectiveness of balancing SoC 2.5

Difference of SoC' [%/s]

among ESUs. Fig.8 (c) demonstrates that the dc bus voltage p=2
2 p=5
can be timely regulated to 800V after experiencing voltage p=10
1.5
deviation induced by ESU dynamics.
1
100
ESU2 ESU1
disconnected ESU2 0.5
80
ESU3
0
SoC [%]

ESU2 0 5 10
60 reconnected Time [min]
(b)
40
830

dc bus voltage [V]

20 820
0 5 10 13
Time [min] 810
(a) 800
5
SoC changing rate [%/s]

ESU2 ESU2 790

ESU1
4 disconnected reconnected
ESU2 780
ESU3
3 770
0 5 10
2 Time [min]
(c)
1
Fig. 9. Current sharing performance in discharging with different coefficient
0
0 5 10 13
E. Case V: Performance under operational mode transition
Time [min]
(b) Finally we assess the performance under the condition of
830
operational mode transition (i.e. Mode1 and Mode 2) in the
ESU2 ESU2
disconnected reconnected islanded dc microgrid. As the effectiveness of coordination
dc bus voltage [V]

820

810
800
790
780
770
0 5
Time [min]
(c)
Fig. 8. Control performance under ESU dynamics (a) SoC states of ESUs; (b)
SoC changing rate of ESUs; and (c) ESU and dc bus voltage.
D. Case IV: SoC balancing with different coefficients
In this case, the control performance against different p
values in the discharging mode (see equation (5) in Section III-
A) is assessed. Here, two ESUs ( SoC1  90% , SoC2  70% )
and PVs are considered with the load of 175 kW. Fig. 9(a)
shows that larger coefficient p in the discharging mode leads
to smaller SoC differences ( SoC  SoC1  SoC2 ), i.e. faster
speed of SoC balancing is obtained. Fig. 9(b) indicates that
although initial SoC '  SoC1 ' SoC2 ' is larger when p  10 ,
it approaches to zero faster as larger p results in bigger
current difference between ESUs under the same initial
condition. It is shown in Fig. 9(c) that, the dc bus voltage can
be well maintained based on the proposed control solution for
all different p values.
control of ESUs for current sharing and voltage regulation
have been confirmed (in case I to IV), this case focuses on the
control performance of short transient process due to mode
switching (involving PV MPPT/off-MPPT).
In this simulation, we consider two ESUs (ESU1 and ESU2)
10 13
with the capacity of 110 Ah and 75 Ah, respectively, and the
initial load is 120 kW. Fig.10 presents the result of PV
operation under operational dynamics, where the maximum
power point varies over the simulation due to the changes of
solar irradiation. The system operates in mode 1 during
t  0  3 s , where three PVs are operated in the MPPT mode,
and the current is shared between two ESUs. The system is
switched to mode 2 at t  3.1s as the dc bus voltage exceeds
1.05 times of U dc _ ref . This is due to the fact that the PV
generation exceeds the demand and the ESS charging limit is
approached when the demand is decreased by 50 kW. Thus, in
the period of t  3  7 s , the actual power point (APP) of PVs
deviates from the maximum power point (MPP) (as shown in
Fig. 10(a)), and simultaneously the ESUs absorb the surplus
energy with the charging current almost at the limited value
(50 A) in mode 2, as shown in Fig. 10(b). It can be found in
Fig. 10(c) that U dc can be maintained to 800V in steady state
after a short disturbance during t  3  5 s , based on the

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TSG.2017.2712658, IEEE
Transactions on Smart Grid
8

proposed voltage control solution. During the period of whilst maximize the utilization of ESUs in mode 2.
t  7  10 s , the system is switched back to mode 1 as the U dc Fig.11 presents the result of bus voltage regulation using
drops at t  7s due to load is increased by 108 kW. In the proposed solution in comparison with the adaptive droop
summary, the result clearly confirms that the control solution control in [25] in the presence of load changes. As same as in
can provide appropriate current sharing among ESUs and case V (the microgrid is operated in mode 1 with the initial
stabilize the dc bus voltage under microgrid dynamics load of 140 kW), the ESUs with the outer loop PI controller
introduced by the mode transition. can maintain the bus voltage without steady-state error. Under
the condition of load decrease ( t  3 s and t  7 s ), the
MPP APP
MPPT off-MPPT MPPT
microgrid is switched to mode 2 and PV generators need to be
50 switched from MPPT to off-MPPT mode in the case that ESUs
MPP=APP=50 kW
MPP=APP=40 kW MPP= 50 kW PV1 cannot regulate the bus voltage alone. The result in Fig. 11 (a)
25
APP= 40 kW demonstrates that, through the process of off-MPPT control (as
PV output power [kW]

0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 illustrated in Fig.5), PVs can identify an appropriate output
50 voltage to eliminate the bus voltage deviation. In contrast, the
MPP=APP=50 kW
25
MPP=50 kW MPP=APP=40 kW
PV2
droop based control depending on the droop coefficient in Fig.
APP=40 kW
11(b) demonstrates an obvious bus voltage deviation under
0
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 microgrid operational dynamics.
50 Rated bus voltage
MPP=APP=50 kW MPP=APP=50 kW Mode1 Mode2
25 PV3
MPP=40 kW 840
APP=30 kW
0

dc bus voltage [V]

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
800
Load decreases Time [s] Load increases
(-50 kW) (+108 kW)
760
(a)
Charging Discharging
100 720 Load decreases
Load decreases
ESU output current [A]

ESU1 (-50 kW) (-80 kW)

Load decreases 680
ESU2
50 (-50 kW)
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
45A
Time [s]
25A (a)
0 -10A Mode1 Mode2
-40A Load decreases Load decreases
Ic_max=-50A Load increases (-50 kW) (-80 kW)
-50 840
(+108 kW)
dc bus voltage[V]

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 800
Time [s]
(b) 760

Mode1 Mode2 Mode1 720 deviation

860 deviation
Load decreases Load increases
dc bus voltage [V]

840 (-50 kW) (+108 kW) 680

820
800
780
760
740
0 1 2 3 4 5
Time [s]
(c)
Fig. 10. The performance of dc islanded microgrid in different operational
modes (a) PV generation; (b) output current of ESUs; (c) dc bus voltage.
F. Case VI: Comparison with droop based voltage regulation
Here, the performance of the proposed decentralized
control solution is further assessed in comparison with the
droop based control approach. Theoretically, the droop based
solution always result in a deviation from the rated bus voltage
during regulation. As discussed in Section III, the proposed
SoC-based current sharing method can eliminate the dc bus
voltage deviation and simultaneously coordinate the SoC
among ESUs in mode 1; and PVs carry out autonomous off-
MPPT control to regulate the bus voltage to the rated value
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Time[s]
Time [s]
(b)
Fig. 10. Performance comparison of dc bus voltage regulation (a) the
proposed solution; (b) adaptive droop control [25].
6 7 8 9 10 V. CONCLUSION AND REMARK
In this paper, an autonomous voltage regulation solution,
through combining double closed-loop control with SoC-based
current sharing was presented for the islanded dc microgrid,
with multiple parallel-connected PVs and ESUs. It was
demonstrated that suggested control solution can maintain the
dc bus voltage stability with under system dynamics (PVs,
ESUs and loads) and operational mode transitions. Due to the
adoption of MPPT/off-MPPT control and SoC-based current
sharing, the utilization of PVs and energy storage was
significantly promoted. It should be highlighted that, unlike the
droop-based solutions, the dc bus voltage can be maintained
without deviation through the regulation of PI controller. In
addition, the proposed solution was carried out in an
autonomous fashion without the requirement of underlying

1949-3053 (c) 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TSG.2017.2712658, IEEE
Transactions on Smart Grid
communication infrastructure, and hence was efficient to
manage dispersed DGs and storage units with minimal
reinforcement hurdles in large-scale deployment.
A number of directions are considered worth further
research effort as follows. This work fully considered the
existence of different converter cable resistances in the
implementation of control solution. The impact of cable line
reactance on the dynamic control performance of dispersed
components in dc microgrids may be significant under
operational uncertainties, which needs to be further evaluated
and quantified. The proposed current sharing method
incorporating SoC and capacity information into the double
closed-loop control, and hence the current sharing
performance firmly relies on the accuracy of SoC estimation.
In reality, the drifts in parallel components, e.g. capacitances,
can result in the accumulating error in SoC calculation. Thus,
the control solution can be further improved by taking such
errors and charging/discharging efficiency variations as well as
battery degradation into consideration or advanced SoC
estimation technique with error detection and correction need
to be adopted. In addition, this work implemented the voltage
regulation through a PI controller and the switch of operational
modes is determined by the dc bus voltage variation. In fact,
the improvement on controllers with more advanced
algorithms and capabilities of correct mode switch decision-
making, e.g. fuzzy-PI and robust PI controller, or adoption of
more sophisticated controllers with faster response capability
needs to be exploited. Thus, the improved stead-state and
dynamic control performance with minimized malfunction can
be obtained for various dc microgrid operational scenarios.
Finally, trial case studies are required to further validate the
performance of the proposed solution through practical
deployment in realistic scenarios.
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