Active Damping Control using Virtual Synchronous Generator and Sliding Mode Technique for Solar PV and BES based Isolated Microgrid

Traditional power generation is experiencing tremendous changes, and renewable-based microgrids emerging to play a vital role in the energy sector change. Though the islanded microgrid lacks inertial support, has extensive control capabilities. Usually, a cascaded control technique with an external virtual synchronous generator (VSG) loop and an inner control loop based on proportional integral (PI) controllers is used to regulate the voltage source converter (VSC) output. This paper presents a robust method sliding mode control (SMC) in the inner loop and VSG based control in the outer loop for active damping of electronically coupled distributed generation (DG) unit. The proposed control technique stabilises the terminal voltage and frequency of the DG unit, while protecting the power-electronic interface from external problems. The suggested control strategy effectively manages the voltage levels and demonstrate a high ability to withstand changes in parameters and load variations. It is found that voltage response and frequency variation using VSG and SMC based control has improved transient behavior than PI controllers. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is explored by conducting extensive research on offline simulation and then on real-time platform. Simulation studies are conducted in the MATLAB/Simulink platform, for which real-time validations are conducted on a real-time simulator based on OPAL-RT.