Optimal Design of Virtual Inertia and Damping Coefficients for Virtual Synchronous Machines

TL;DR

This paper presents an algorithm for optimally designing virtual inertia and damping coefficients for inverter-based virtual synchronous machines to improve frequency response in power systems with high renewable energy penetration.

Contribution

It formulates the design as a constrained H2 norm minimization problem and develops an efficient gradient algorithm for this non-convex optimization.

Findings

The algorithm effectively balances damping rate and frequency nadir.

Application to a test case shows improved performance over existing methods.

The approach enhances primary frequency control in inverter-dominated power systems.

Abstract

Increased penetration of inverter-connected renewable energy sources (RES) in the power system has resulted in a decrease in available rotational inertia which serves as an immediate response to frequency deviation due to disturbances. The concept of virtual inertia has been proposed to combat this decrease by enabling the inverters to produce active power in response to a frequency deviation like a synchronous generator. In this paper, we present an algorithm to optimally design the inertia and damping coefficient required for an inverter-based virtual synchronous machine (VSM) to participate efficiently in the inertia response portion of primary frequency control. We design the objective function to explicitly trade-off between competing objectives such as the damping rate the the frequency nadir. Specifically, we formulate the design problem as a constrained and regularized H2 norm minimization problem, and develop an efficient gradient algorithm for this non-convex problem. This proposed algorithm is applied to a test case to demonstrate its performance against existing methods.