Grid-forming control of three-phase and single-phase converters across unbalanced transmission and distribution systems

TL;DR

This paper develops a comprehensive analytical framework for grid-forming control of mixed three-phase and single-phase converters in unbalanced power systems, ensuring stability and self-balancing through novel feedback mechanisms.

Contribution

It introduces a quasi-steady-state network model and provides new stability conditions for converters, including self-synchronization and phase-balancing strategies, across transmission and distribution systems.

Findings

Single-phase converters can self-synchronize to a balanced state.

Phase-balancing feedback improves stability and reduces unbalance.

Case studies validate the analytical conditions on IEEE test systems.

Abstract

In this work, we investigate grid-forming control for power systems containing three-phase and single-phase converters connected to unbalanced distribution and transmission networks, investigate self-balancing between single-phase converters, and propose a novel balancing feedback for grid-forming control that explicitly allows to trade-off unbalances in voltage and power. We develop a quasi-steady-state power network model that allows to analyze the interactions between three-phase and single-phase power converters across transmission, distribution, and standard transformer interconnections. We first investigate conditions under which this general network admits a well-posed kron-reduced quasi-steady-state network model. Our main contribution leverages this reduced-order model to develop analytical conditions for stability of the overall network with grid-forming three-phase and single-phase converters connected through standard transformer interconnections. Specifically, we provide conditions on the network topology under which (i) single-phase converters autonomously self-synchronize to a phase-balanced operating point and (ii) single-phase converters phase-balance through synchronization with three-phase converters. Moreover, we establish that the conditions can be relaxed if a phase-balancing feedback control is used. Finally, case studies combining detailed models of transmission systems (i.e., IEEE 9-bus) and distribution systems (i.e., IEEE 13-bus) are used to illustrate the results for (i) a power system containing a mix of transmission and distribution connected converters and, (ii) a power system solely using distribution-connected converters at the grid edge.