Recovery of Power Flow to Critical Infrastructures using Mode-dependent Droop-based Inverters

TL;DR

This paper introduces a mode-dependent droop control strategy for inverters to ensure seamless power flow recovery to critical infrastructures after grid failures, with stability assessment and real-time validation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel droop control approach enabling power recovery with minimal grid information and provides a stability framework validated through hardware-in-the-loop simulations.

Findings

Effective power flow recovery demonstrated in real-time simulations.

Minimal grid information required for mode transition.

Stable operation confirmed through control-oriented modeling.

Abstract

Recovery of power flow to critical infrastructures, after grid failure, is a crucial need arising in scenarios that are increasingly becoming more frequent. This article proposes a power transition and recovery strategy by proposing a mode-dependent droop control-based inverters. The control strategy of inverters achieves the following objectives 1) regulate the output active and reactive power by the droop-based inverters to a desired value while operating in on-grid mode 2) seamless transition and recovery of power flow injections into the critical loads in the network by inverters operating in off-grid mode after the main grid fails; 3) require minimal information of grid/network status and conditions for the mode transition of droop control. A framework for assessing the stability of the system and to guide the choice of parameters for controllers is developed using control-oriented modeling. A comprehensive controller hardware-in-the-loop-based real-time simulation study on a test-system based on the realistic electrical network of M-Health Fairview, University of Minnesota Medical Center, corroborates the efficacy of the proposed controller strategy.