Distributed cooperative control of DC microgrid cluster with multiple voltage levels

Multiple DC microgrids are interconnected to form a DC microgrid cluster, which can effectively improve the renewable energy consumption capacity and power supply reliability of the microgrid cluster through sharing of energy storage among the participating DC microgrids. However, the existing methods are not able to flexibly coordinate the power flows between DC microgrids connected by a multiport converter. In this paper, a distributed cooperative control method is proposed for a DC microgrid cluster with multiple voltage levels connected by a multi-port interconnected converter. A multi-active-bridge (MAB) converter acts as a bridge for power exchange among microgrids, enabling the sharing of distributed energy storage among microgrids under a sparse communication network. The improved secondary control overcomes the drawbacks of droop control and achieves deviation-free voltage regulation and accurate load/source sharing of the energy storage converters within the cluster. The proposed secondary control can be used to retrofit the existing DC distribution grids to permit access of renewable energy. In addition, the improved voltage observer provides the voltage information of other nodes in a microgrid in addition to the energy storage information, reducing the voltage estimation error caused by the uneven distribution of energy storages. Finally, hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) experiments of the cluster with three DC microgrids verify the control performance, the flexible plug-and-play capability, and the high tolerance of communication failure. © 2024 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.