IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 29, NO.

2, MARCH 2014 805

Integrating VSCs to Weak Grids by Nonlinear

Power Damping Controller With
Self-Synchronization Capability
Mahdi Ashabani and Yasser Abdel-Rady I. Mohamed, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract—This paper presents a new control topology to en- Total connecting resistance.
able effective integration of voltage source converters (VSCs) in
weak grids. The controller has two main parts. The first part Total connecting reactance.
is a linear power-damping and synchronizing controller which
automatically synchronizes a VSC to a grid by providing damping Line resistance.
and synchronizing power components, and enables effective Line reactance.
full power injection even under very weak grid conditions. The
controller adopts cascaded angle, frequency and power loops Total interface impedance.
for frequency and angle regulation. The controller emulates the
dynamic performance of synchronous machines, which eases grid VSC voltage angle.
integration and provides a virtual inertia control framework for VSC frequency.
VSCs to damp power and frequency oscillations. Although the
linear controller offers stable and smooth operation in many Rated frequency.
cases, it cannot ensure system stability in weak grids, where
sudden large disturbances rapidly drift system dynamics to the Set frequency.
nonlinear region. To overcome this difficulty, a supplementary Rated line voltage.
nonlinear controller is developed to assist the linear controller
and enhance system performance under large-signal nonlinear Power-frequency characteristics slope.
disturbances, such as self-synchronization, disturbances in grid
frequency and angle, high power injection in very weak grids and Power-angle characteristics slope.
fault-ride-through conditions.
Power loop integrator gain.
Index Terms—Distributed generation, nonlinear control, power
damping, voltage source converter (VSC) control, weak grid. Proportional gain of the voltage controller.
Integrator gain of the voltage controller.
NOMENCLATURE Proportional gain of the reactive power controller.
Integrator gain of the reactive controller.
VSC output real power.
Damping power.
Reference real power of VSC.
Synchronization power.
VSC output reactive power.
Cut-off frequency of the voltage loop low-pass
Short circuit capacity of grid.
filter.
Filter voltage command.
Control input.
VSC voltage amplitude.
Mapped control input.
Filter voltage.
Local load bus voltage amplitude. I. INTRODUCTION
Filter resistance.
Filter reactance.
C ONSISTENT development of renewable distributed
generations (DG) resources, such as wind turbines and
photovoltaic (PV) arrays, has resulted in significant tendency
toward optimal control, operation and grid integration of DG
units [1]. Seamless integration of DG units is a major driving
Manuscript received March 21, 2013; revised June 05, 2013 and July 22,
2013; accepted August 29, 2013. Date of publication October 01, 2013; date of force in the context of smart grids. Voltage source converters
current version February 14, 2014. Paper no. TPWRS-00348-2013. (VSCs) are the main enabling technology for interfacing re-
The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engi- newable and clean energy resources in modern grids [1]–[6].
neering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G2V4, Canada (e-mail: The main control topologies of VSCs are vector control [2]–[4]
ashabani@ualberta.ca; yasser_rady@ieee.org).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online and direct power control [5], [6]. To obtain current and voltage
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. components in a synchronously-rotating reference-frame, a
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRS.2013.2280659 phase-locked loop (PLL) is required. Furthermore, the PLL is

0885-8950 © 2013 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.
806 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 29, NO. 2, MARCH 2014

necessary to extract grid-frequency and initial angle to guar-

antee smooth converter-grid connection via a synchronization
process [7]. However, the PLL dynamics, during transients,
adversely affects overall system stability especially in weak
grids [8]. Despite the advantages of the vector control tech-
nique, there is considerable tendency toward developing new
control topologies which eliminate the need for a PLL (i.e.,
self-synchronization [8], [9]). To overcome difficulties associ-
Fig. 1. Circuit diagram of a grid-connected VSC.
ated with vector control of VSCs connected to very weak grids,
the concept of power synchronization has been presented in
[8] and [10]–[12] to provide an inherent synchronization with
grid in steady-state similar to a synchronous generator (SG). paper. The controller adopts a power synchronization loop with
Nevertheless, the proposed methods are synthesized based additional cascaded damping and synchronizing loops. The
on small-signal dynamics and cannot guarantee large-signal main characteristics of the proposed controller are summarized
stability. as follows: 1) the hybrid nonlinear power damping controller
Among challenging issues facing DG integration is the DG enables self-synchronization of a VSC in weak grids. This
connection to very weak grids (high impedance grids). This ob- means that the controller does not need a separate synchroniza-
jective gains its importance due to high and fast penetration tion unit and it automatically synchronizes itself with the grid.
level of off-shore wind turbines and remote PV generation units Self-synchronization is a new concept [9], and its importance
[20], [21]. In fact, the grid stiffness is a measure of the con- is more pronounced in weak grids. It should be noted that the
necting line capacity to transfer power to a grid [21], [22]. In process in [9] still needs the inception time of synchronization
other words, weak ac grids encounter more difficulty for power and some information from the remote grid, thus it cannot
flow transfer, thus the maximum amount of available power that realize a true plug-and-play operation. Moreover, its perfor-
can be injected to the grid is more limited. Moreover, the equiv- mance and stability in weak grids have not been investigated.
alent grid impedance is time-varying as a result of faults and It is noticeable that during islanding, an MG may usually face
load power variation. To represent the strength of ac systems, permanent frequency drop representing considerable frequency
the short-circuit capacity ratio (SCR) is proposed as an index and angle mismatch at the moment of reconnection, however,
of an ac system strength relative to the power rating of a VSC. with the proposed controller system does not need any ini-
A major drawback of vector control is its limited capability to tial synchronization with grid and it realizes a plug-and-play
transfer the rated power in weak grids. For example, in [8], it has system. This is the first time the concepts of plug-and-play
been shown that in a weak grid with SCR , only 40% of the and nonlinear self-synchronization in VSCs are introduced. 2)
maximum power capacity of a VSC can be utilized. With sig- The controller has cascaded frequency, angle and power loops.
nificant tuning effort of the vector controller parameters and the Therefore, better stability margin and damping characteristics
PLL, this percentage can be increased to 60% [8]. As an alter- can be achieved. This is a continuation of [23], where the
native, the concept of power synchronization control proposed concept of cooperative droop has been proposed. However,
in [8] and [10]–[12] is also applicable to enable more power the method in [23] demands accurate tuning of load angle and
transmission by a VSC by emulating SGs. Basically, SGs do real power references, and lacks voltage regulation. In this
not have any limitations for connection to weak systems, con- paper, this problem is resolved by using a frequency loop as
sequently control methods, such as power synchronization [8] a first controller, therefore, the frequency reference is easily
which mimic SG’s characteristics can effectively enable VSCs set equal to the grid nominal frequency. 3) Since the controller
integration in very weak grids. However, the developed tech- has a dynamic behavior similar to conventional SGs, it can
niques for weak grid integration are based on linearized models be connected to very weak grids with SCR without loss
and lack the self-synchronization and plug-and-play ability. of stability. 4) To guarantee system stability in all operating
Furthermore, islanded operation of DG units can be allowed conditions especially when load angle drifts to the nonlinear
to enhance service reliability [13]. The most common approach region, a nonlinear supplementary controller is developed. 5)
for power management in islanded operation of VSCs is fre- The controller is applicable to both modes of operation, i.e.,
quency droop [14]; however, this approach causes a permanent islanded and grid-connected modes; therefore the need for
frequency offset. Thus, when self-synchronization control is ap- islanding detection and system reconfiguration is automati-
plied, frequency and angle mismatch between a VSC and grid cally eliminated. 6) It provides fault-ride-through capability
at the moment of connection may cause severe transients. An- by proper adjustment of frequency, load angle and voltage
other major concern related to VSC operation in weak grids is amplitude, which in turn results in limiting current flowing into
the lack of physical inertia in conventional VSCs resulting in the interfacing circuit. It also automatically tracks and damps
poor overall frequency and load angle regulation; thus, islanded disturbances in main grid. The proposed control topology is
operation of microgrids (MGs) with high penetration of VSCs general as it can be easily applied to VSC-based high-voltage
can be prone to frequency instability [15]–[17]. Accordingly, dc (HVDC) transmission systems and DG units; however the
significant efforts have been recently devoted to introduce some main focus of this paper is on DG applications.
dynamics for frequency using virtual inertia. Usually, the virtual
inertia refers to a short-term energy storage which is added to a
II. PROPOSED LINEAR CONTROLLER TOPOLOGY
VSC [16]–[18]. In [19], the virtual inertia is emulated by proper
dc-link control. This paper focuses on the development of a nonlinear power
Motivated by the aforementioned challenges, a hybrid damping control strategy for VSC units in weak grids with
nonlinear control of VSCs in weak grids is proposed in this applicability to both grid-connected and islanded modes of
ASHABANI AND MOHAMED: INTEGRATING VSCS TO WEAK GRIDS BY NONLINEAR POWER DAMPING CONTROLLER 807

Fig. 2. Proposed linear control scheme.

operation. Fig. 1 shows the schematic view of a grid-con- grid. The reference frequency in the frequency loop is
nected VSC supplying a local load. The most critical issue set equal to the grid frequency, and in steady-state conditions,
for controller design is the complexity of the system due to the VSC produces the reference power . This can be the
nonlinear behavior of the power transfer dynamics. Usually, case in dispatchable DG units or VSC-based HVDC transmis-
linear controllers are developed based on small-signal lineariza- sion systems. In the case when the primary source falls short to
tion; however, the control performance inherently depends on supply the output power, short-term energy storage can be added
specific operating points. In this paper, a two-level topology to the dc-link to compensate for the energy shortage during
with cooperative nonlinear and linear controllers is developed. transients. The transferred real power is expressed by the well-
The first level is a power synchronizing-damping controller. known equation
The second level is a nonlinear controller supporting the
linear part to enhance system stability in weak grids or during (1)
self-synchronization where load angle is large and system
works in the nonlinear region. The voltage generation principle This equation shows that the real power that can be trans-
is similar to an SG where the voltage frequency and load angle mitted from a VSC is limited. To represent the strength of the
are tuned by power damping-synchronizing loop, whereas the connecting line, the SCR is defined as
voltage amplitude is given by voltage regulation loop similar
to an automatic voltage regulator (AVR). The VSC’s output
(2)
real power is controlled directly by adjusting the load angle
using the power-damping loop, whereas the reactive power
(or alternating voltage) is controlled by adjusting the voltage where the short-circuit capacity of the ac system is given
magnitude. Since the VSC is voltage-controlled one, an inner by
current loop is not necessary except during large transients
such as faults where the control strategy should be changed (3)
to current control mode to limit the current amplitude [10]. It
should be noted that the proposed outer-loop controller can and is the circuit equivalent Thevenin impedance. This im-
be also integrated with cascaded voltage-current control loops plies that the weaker the grid, the lower the power transfer ca-
to ensure high power quality injection and inherent current pacity of the line. In a weak grid with , the theoretical
limitation during faults. In this case, the synchronization angle maximum power transfer capacity is 1.0 p.u.
for dq-frame transformation is obtained from the proposed The power-damping control law for a VSC is proposed as
outer-loop controller instead of a PLL as shown in Fig. 2.
(4)
A. Power Damping/Synchronization Control Concept
The base of power damping control of a grid-connected VSC As it can be seen, the controller presents controlled dynamics
is that the controller provides active damping and synchroniza- for angle and frequency. To eliminate the switching effect su-
tion power to attenuate power, frequency and load angle oscilla- perimposed on the real power, a low-pass filter can be adopted
tions, and synchronize the VSC with the grid during steady-state and the filtered power (average power) is fed to the controller.
operation. By changing the control strategy of VSCs to comply This low-pass filter also gives more degrees of freedom in the
with the power damping characteristics, VSCs can be integrated control design and may introduce more damping for angle and
to weak grids and also cooperate with SGs in power grids. Fig. 2 frequency oscillations. The damping and synchronization power
demonstrates the basic principle of the proposed controller in components are given by
the polar system. It has three cascaded loops, namely frequency,
angle and power loops. Based on the frequency error, the refer- (5)
ence of the load angle is determined and the real power refer- (6)
ence is obtained as a function of the load angle error. Finally,
the power synchronization loop adjusts VSC’s instantaneous The synchronization and damping powers attenuate load
frequency and load angle. The angle and frequency loops gen- angle and frequency fluctuations around an equilibrium point
erate synchronization and damping power components for the and synchronize the VSC with the grid. Beside the inherent
VSC, thus it can inherently track frequency and angle devia- synchronization with the grid in steady-state, it is important
tions of the grid and automatically synchronizes itself with the to take into account that the VSC’s frequency and angle are
808 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 29, NO. 2, MARCH 2014

TABLE I
CONTROLLER PARAMETERS

Fig. 3. Control topologies for output voltage control. (a) P-V bus control.
(b) P-Q bus control strategy.

internally available; therefore, there is no need for a PLL in The frequency dynamic equation is expressed by (4) where
steady-state operation and several transient conditions. is given by
B. Voltage Amplitude Controller (8)
The reactive power of a DG unit can be controlled to 1) reg-
ulate the terminal voltage (PV bus) or 2) achieve a specific The voltage loop dynamic equation is given by
output reactive power (PQ bus). Fig. 3 shows these two different
variants. In the first, the voltage reference is compared to the (9)
actual output voltage. In order to track the reference voltage, (10)
a proportional-integral (PI) controller is employed aiming at
compensating the input error by proper adjustment of VSC’s where is the output of the integrator , and is the filter
output voltage. The output of the PI controller is processed by voltage amplitude expressed by
a low-pass filter and finally the VSC’s voltage amplitude refer-
ence is obtained. The low-pass filter plays two different roles;
(11)
first, it offers more degrees of freedom to tune the low-pass filter
cut-off frequency and PI controller parameters such that satis-
factory transient and steady-state performances are achieved. In (12)
weak grids, usually it is essential to regulate the grid-voltage at
the point of common coupling, thus PV bus is the common ap- (13)
proach in weak grids [11].
An alternative to the voltage control is reactive power regula- The currents dynamics in the dq reference-frame are given by
tion as shown in Fig. 3(b). However, this is not the common case
in weak grids. This is due to the fact that the P-Q control strategy
significantly degrades DG stability in weak grids as compared
to the P-V control [11]. Similar to Fig. 3(a), a low-pass filter ex- (14)
ists after the PI controller to mimic the flux decay behavior of
an SG. This low-pass filter allows the suppression of voltage os-
cillations while voltage tracking time-response and steady-state (15)
error are still kept within acceptable limits. The inner current
and voltage loops can be arbitrarily added to the controller for Equations (4) and (7)–(15) represent a sixth-order system
the sake of voltage and current regulation and limiting the cur- and involve all the eigenvalues of the multivariable multi-input
rent amplitude subsequent to faults as shown in Fig. 2. multi-output controller and the related power system. Figs. 4
and 5 show the loci of the eigenvalues as a function of the real
power control loop parameters and , respectively. The
III. SYSTEM MODELING sixth eigenvalue is not shown here because it appears far away
To evaluate system dynamic performance in a weak grid, a from the imaginary axis. The dominant poles are highly depen-
small-signal stability analysis of a grid-connected VSC is pre- dent on these parameters. Equations (14) and (15) introduce two
sented in this section. The three-phase power system involves eigenvalues (eigens 4 and 5) which are contributed to the elec-
a converter and its controller, RL filter, connecting line and in- tric circuit and are independent of controller parameters. The
finite grid. Assuming an ideal VSC, the VSC local voltage is right-most eigenvalue is mainly dependent on whereas
equal to the controller command, thus it is possible to model the mainly affects eigenvalue 3. As shown in Fig. 5, the position of
VSC and PWM block by an average voltage approach [24]. The eigenvalue 2 basically depends on . During the design
system parameters are given in Table I. The augmented model process, it should be noted that although lower values of and
of the VSC and its controller can be developed as follows. First, higher values of result in higher stability margin and
the load angle dynamic equation is given by faster response, they may adversely increase the steady-state
error especially in weak grids where load angle is large. In other
(7) words, in weak grids, acceptable steady-error is achieved at the
ASHABANI AND MOHAMED: INTEGRATING VSCS TO WEAK GRIDS BY NONLINEAR POWER DAMPING CONTROLLER 809

Fig. 6. Nonlinear supplementary control structure.

overcome this issue, a nonlinear back-stepping power damping

controller is proposed and augmented with the linear controller
as shown in Fig. 6.
The overall system model is

(16)
(17)
(18)

where and ,
and . is defined as
, where is the control input.
The control objective is to ensure the convergence of the error
Fig. 4. Loci of the eigenvalues as a function of the real power control loop to zero. The first step is to stabilize , thus the
parameters, (a) , . (b) . Lyapunov function

(19)

is defined and the reference of frequency deviation value and

are given by

(20)
(21)

In the next step, the Lyapunov function is defined as

and is chosen to stabilize and

(22)
Fig. 5. The loci of the eigenvalues as a function of the voltage amplitude con-
trol loop parameters . where

cost of lower stability margin, thus instability can be yielded (23)

during contingencies where load angle swings become large.
(24)
IV. NONLINEAR POWER DAMPING CONTROLLER
In weak grids with SCR less than 4, the load angle is usu- Finally, by defining
ally large and approaches the steady-state stability limit; ac-
cordingly, in the case that a DG unit is required to supply its (25)
rated power, power stability may be significantly degraded. The
proposed cooperative angle-frequency droop control can enable and following the approach presented in [23] and [25], it can be
higher load angles. However, as a linear controller, it cannot shown that the stability of the overall system is confirmed if
guarantee large-signal stability in all operating conditions espe-
cially when system dynamics drifts to the nonlinear region. This
is more pronounced in sudden large transients such as self-syn-
chronization where any large mismatch between frequency and
angle of both sides across the connecting breaker (or recloser)
may contribute to poor performance and even instability. To (26)
810 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 29, NO. 2, MARCH 2014

Fig. 7. Simulated system.

where

(27)

(28)
(29)

and is simplified to

(30)

Since the nonlinear controller is a supplementary one pro- Fig. 8. Controller performance in low-power injection.
viding an additional signal for the linear controller, the designs
of the controllers are decoupled. The practicality of the non-
linear controller is also discussed in [23]. The following results can be retained from the simulation
results: from sections (a) and (b) it is drawn that the controller
is able to function in both low-power and high-power levels
V. EVALUATION RESULTS
in very weak grids. The SCR of the system is equal to one
Fig. 7 shows the configuration of the simulated system. and as it will be shown that the VSC can easily inject 0.85
The system is composed of a 7.0 MW VSC, filter, local load, p.u. real power to the grid while it has well-damped transient
transformer and an interface line connecting the VSC to a performance. This is in contrast with conventional vector
grid. It is worth to mention that the impedance control which can only exchange 0.6 p.u. real power with a
is the equivalent impedance of the stiff source referred to grid; otherwise it might face instability [8]. As will be shown in
the distribution level. The simulation study was conducted subsection C, the controller presents very smooth transition to
in MATLAB/SIMULINK environment. The controller pa- the islanded mode although there is no any islanding detection
rameters are presented in Table I. The DG unit supplies the process and the controller’s configuration and parameters are
local load at its output terminal and is connected to a stiff not changed. The self-synchronization ability of the controller
grid through a very weak interface with total impedance of will be presented in subsection D where the re-closer is sud-
. Since the con- denly closed and the VSC is connected to the grid without a
necting line is almost inductive, the power capacity of the pre-synchronization process which is mandatory in conven-
interface line is approximated by tional controllers. In this case, the supplementary nonlinear
controller preserves the self-synchronization capability with
(31) large-signal stability. The controller without supplementary
nonlinear control cannot offer self-synchronization capability
where the notations are defined in Fig. 1 and is the total reac- under large-signal disturbances. Fault-ride-thorough is another
tance of the transformer, line and stiff grid advantage of the proposed controller and it will be shown that
. Therefore, the maximum real power transfer capacity of although the VSC works as a P-V bus, the current flowing in
the connecting line is equal MW. the power circuit during a three-phase fault is limited because
Since the local load power at the rated voltage is 2.5 MW, thus of proper load angle adjustment. Moreover, because of its
the VSC’s maximum power capacity is about 7 MW. damping and synchronizing powers, it has the ability to work
The DG works as a PV bus aiming at keeping the filter output as a virtual PLL and tracks grid’s angle and frequency variation
voltage constant during grid connection. A wide variety as presented in subsection E.
of scenarios have been applied to verify the effectiveness of
the proposed hybrid nonlinear controller. System performance A. Low-Power Injection
at low- and high-power references, transition to islanding, To study the behavior of the controller in a wide range of
self-synchronization, sudden deviation in grid angle and three operating points, it assumed that system initially supplies 80
phase fault is studied. The advantage of the proposed controller kW, and at , the power reference is increased to 2.0 MW.
is its flexibility to work in different conditions, i.e., grid-con- The real power response is shown in Fig. 8, which shows very
nected and islanded modes without reconfiguration whereas the smooth transition. The rise-time is about 0.6 s and the system
nonlinear grid synchronizer enables the plug-and-play feature. yields accurate reference tracking without any overshoot.
ASHABANI AND MOHAMED: INTEGRATING VSCS TO WEAK GRIDS BY NONLINEAR POWER DAMPING CONTROLLER 811

Fig. 10. Real power during transition to islanding.

Fig. 11. Current waveforms subsequent to islanding.

as shown in Fig. 10. To achieve faster response, should

be reduced; nevertheless, it may cause larger steady-state error
in the grid-connected mode. The corresponding current wave-
Fig. 9. Controller performance in high-power injection. (a) Real power. forms are shown in Fig. 11, which shows smooth and fast tran-
(b) Frequency. (c) Phase-voltage amplitude. sition because of the generality of the controller in both modes.

D. Self-Synchronized Grid Restoration

B. High-Power Injection With High Load Angles It is common that a recloser automatically reconnects a DG
At , the reference power is varied from 2.0 MW to 6.0 unit to the main grid after a special time period (usually 1 s).
MW (0.86 p.u.) which is close to the VSC’s maximum power ca- This is due to the fact that most of faults are cleared after few
pacity at constant voltage operation and a load angle more than cycles. In this case, connection occurs without synchronization
1.03 rad is expected. Fig. 9(a) shows the real power waveform which may lead to severe transients as a result of frequency and
and Fig. 9(b) and (c) shows the frequency and phase voltage am- angle mismatch of both sides of the recloser at the moment of
plitude variation, respectively. As it is observed, the response is connection. Weak grids suffer more from the resynchronization
smooth but with larger rise-time; however, it is still stable with transients due to the fact that load angle is inherently large and
damped response and the output power easily reaches 6.0 MW. after grid restoration it may easily move to the nonlinear re-
The output voltage amplitude of the VSC during this transient is gion and even pass where instability is expected. Fig. 12(a)
shown Fig. 9(c) presenting the controller action to boost VSC’s and (b) shows the corresponding waveforms and clearly shows
voltage during load angle variation to enable high real power that the system with nonlinear controller provides smooth and
injection. This is in contrast with the natural behavior of the fast grid connection. This excellent performance occurs under
system which yields voltage sag subsequent to output power in- the fact that there is about 0.9 Hz frequency mismatch between
crement and consequently higher voltage drop. the grid and VSC, and the reference power is equal to 6.8 MW
corresponding a the load angle 1.32 rad. The system response
without using the supplementary controller is demonstrated in
C. Transition To Islanded Mode
Fig. 12(c), which shows that the weak grid conditions cause in-
Islanded operation is another scenario that may occur in DG stability. The current waveform of the system with supplemen-
applications to supply local critical loads. At , the VSC tary control is presented in Fig. 13, which shows the system
is switched to the islanded mode due to a fault in the grid. well-damped behavior even in the out-of-phase reclosing sce-
No controller-mode switching action or reconfiguration is re- narios, and verifies the plug-and-play feature of the proposed
quired. The transition is again seamless without any instability controller.
812 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 29, NO. 2, MARCH 2014

Fig. 13. Current waveforms subsequent to self-synchronization with supple-

mentary control.

Fig. 12. System performance during grid restoration, (a) Real power with non-
linear supplementary controller. (b) Frequency. (c) Real power without the sup-
plementary controller.

E. Fault-Ride-Through Capability: Disturbance in the Grid

Angle
Fig. 14. Load angle variation subsequent to disturbance in the grid angle.
In addition to the high connecting impedance, weak grids may
be characterized by sudden deviations in the voltage angle and
frequency. Therefore, it is assumed that at , the power
reference is reduced to 4.0 MW, which is not shown here, and F. Fault-Ride-Through Capability: Three-Phase Fault
at the angle of the grid voltage is abruptly reduced by Fig. 15 shows the VSC’s fault-ride-through performance
0.87 rad. when a three-phase bolted fault occurs near to the end of con-
The resulting waveforms of the load angle and phase voltage necting line 2. The fault starts at and after 0.16 s, line
amplitude are shown in Fig. 14 (a) and (b), respectively, which two is disconnected from the rest of the grid by the protection
verify that the VSC easily catches the angle deviations even in system. Fig. 15(a) shows the real power variation, and reveals
large disturbances without loss of stability and/or poor perfor- that the output real power is limited to 2.9 MW. Note that about
mance. It causes an overshoot in the output power and the load 2.5 MW of this power is absorbed by the local load. Fig. 15(b)
angle that is damped within 0.5 s. This is a very potentially in- and (c) shows the waveforms of VSC’s instantaneous output
teresting feature of the controller where it acts as a virtual PLL, current and amplitude of the output voltage, respectively. As it
and automatically tracks grid frequency and angle deviations. is seen, the converter’s current is limited to 1420 A which is
In this case, as shown in Fig. 14(b), the output voltage ampli- within the acceptable limits and less than the nominal current;
tude is suddenly reduced to keep the output power limited. This therefore, the VSC is not subjected to over-current during
is due to the fact that a lag in the grid voltage angle results in three-phase fault. It should be noted since the VSC acts as a
sudden output power increment, thus the output voltage must be P-V bus, during the fault it aims at keeping the output voltage
reduced to preserve real power stability. constant while the current amplitude is limited by proper
ASHABANI AND MOHAMED: INTEGRATING VSCS TO WEAK GRIDS BY NONLINEAR POWER DAMPING CONTROLLER 813

Fig. 15. System waveforms subsequent to a three-phase fault. (a) Real power.
(b) Instantaneous current waveforms. (c) Amplitude of the phase-voltage.

adjustment of the load angle and inner current limiter. In fact,

power damping/synchronization loops aim at limiting the real
power and consequently the current flowing in the VSC circuit
by proper adjustment of the load angle, whereas the voltage
regulation loop tries to keep the local bus voltage constant.
The nonlinear supplementary controller also helps the power
damping/synchronization loops to undergo the load angle and
real power deviations. The real power waveform is smooth and Fig. 16. System waveforms subsequent to reconnection of line 2. (a) Real
confined during the fault. During the fault, the voltage drops power. (b) Instantaneous current. (c) Amplitude of the output phase-voltage.
and reactive power increases. At , the breakers of (d) Load angle.
both sides of the connecting line 2 act and the line is decoupled
from the rest of the grid. Accordingly, fault is cleared and the
line impedance is increased to , which is twice the robustness of the proposed controller against network system
initial value representing very weak system. This separation uncertainties because it introduces sudden large variation in
event is another large-signal transient occurring in the system. total line impedance. It is supposed the fault is cleared at
Upon disconnection of line 2 at , voltage, real when line 2 is again switched into the circuit. The
power and current return to their initial conditions before the corresponding waveforms subsequent to reconnection of line 2,
fault but in a different operating point since total interfacing such as real power, current, amplitude of the phase-voltage and
impedance is doubled as compared to the pre-fault condition. load angle are presented in Fig. 16. It should be noted that this
It should be noted that in these scenarios, the reference real case is different from the mal-synchronization case presented in
power is kept constant at 4.0 MW. This scenario verifies the subsection C, because only one line is out and system has kept
814 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER SYSTEMS, VOL. 29, NO. 2, MARCH 2014

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tion Conf. (PEAM), 2011. degree at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
[5] T. Noguchi, H. Tomiki, S. Kondo, and I. Takahashi, “Direct power con- His research interests cover many aspects of power engineering including
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of control and grid synchronization for distributed power generation on November 25, 1977. He received the B.Sc. (with honors) and M.Sc. degrees
systems,” IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., vol. 53, no. 5, pp. 1398–1408, in electrical engineering from Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, in 2000 and
Oct. 2006. 2004, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Uni-
[8] L. Zhang, L. Harnefors, and H. -P. Nee, “Power-synchronization con- versity of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada, in 2008.
trol of grid-connected voltage-source converters,” IEEE Trans. Power He is currently with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
Syst., vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 809–819, May 2010. University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada, as an Associate Professor.
[9] Q. -C. Zhong, P. -L. Nguyen, Z. Ma, and W. Sheng, “Self-synchronised His research interests include dynamics and controls of power converters;
synchronverters: inverters without a dedicated synchronization unit,” distributed and renewable generation; microgrids; modeling, analysis and
IEEE Trans. Power Electron., vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 617–630, 2014. control of smart grids; electric machines and motor drives.
[10] L. Zhang, L. Harnefors, and H.-P. Nee, “Modeling and control of VSC- Dr. Mohamed is an Associate Editor of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS
HVDC links connected to island systems,” IEEE Trans. Power Syst., ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS. He is also a Guest Editor of the IEEE
vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 783–793, May 2011. TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS Special Section on “Distributed
[11] L. Zhang, L. Harnefors, and H.-P. Nee, “Analysis of stability limi- Generation and Microgrids”. His biography is listed in Marque’s Who is Who
tations of a VSC-HVDC link using power-synchronization control,” in the World. He is a registered Professional Engineer in the Province of
IEEE Trans. Power Syst., vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 1326–1336, Aug. 2011. Alberta.