Analysis of droop control method in an autonomous microgrid

In this paper an analytical approach is conducted to evaluate the droop control method in an islanding microgrid. Droop control is the key solution for sharing the demand power between generators in autonomous microgrids where there is no support from the electricity distribution grid. In the paper, three important load types are investigated to verify the droop control performance. First, coupling of active power and reactive power is considered in the microgrid and a new method is proposed to facilitate separate control of powers. In the proposed method the effects of droop gains on decoupling of active power and reactive power control, voltage regulation, power oscillation and system stability are studied. In the second load type study, by applying the different types of faults, induction motor characteristics are observed. By simulation results it is shown that the fault intensity and duration will determine how the microgrid attains to fast frequency convergence and how fast protection system operation can improve system stability. In the third case, imbalanced nonlinear load is studied in the microgrid and the influences of embedded controllers on harmonic distortion, system balance and voltage regulation are observed. © 2017 Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Centro de Ciencias Aplicadas y Desarrollo Tecnológico. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).