An Improved Virtual Inertia Control Strategy for Low Voltage AC Microgrids with Hybrid Energy Storage Systems

This paper proposes a novel virtual inertia control (VIC) method based on a feedforward decoupling strategy to address the low inertia issue of power-converter-interfaced microgrids. The feedforward control scheme is employed to eliminate the coupling between active and reactive power caused by line impedance. The active power-voltage droop can be applied to the battery converter in the hybrid energy storage system (HESS). A novel VIC method is developed for the supercapacitor (SC) converter of HESS to increase the inertia of the microgrid. Detailed small-signal modeling of the SC converter with the proposed VIC was conducted, and the transfer function model was obtained. Parameter analysis of the virtual inertia and virtual damping was carried out with the pole-zero map method, and the step response characteristic of output voltage amplitude with power variation was analyzed in detail, deriving the parameter design principle. The simulation study verifies the effectiveness and validity of the proposed control strategy. The proposed feedforward decoupling method and VIC can be widely applied in microgrids to enhance inertia and improve their power quality.