Mitigation of Structural Harmonic Instability in Virtual Admittance-Based Grid-Forming Inverters via Mimicking Skin Effect

TL;DR

This paper identifies a harmonic instability mechanism in virtual admittance controllers for grid-forming inverters and proposes a skin effect-inspired modification with a parallel resistor to improve stability and damping.

Contribution

It reveals a delay-independent harmonic instability mechanism and introduces a simple resistor-based modification to enhance passivity and stability in VA-CC schemes.

Findings

The instability is caused by negative resistance in the transfer function.

Adding a parallel resistor mimics skin effect damping.

Experimental results confirm improved harmonic stability.

Abstract

The virtual admittance-current controller (VA-CC) scheme is widely employed to emulate an equivalent inductance in front of the internal voltage source of grid-forming inverters. However, recent studies have reported harmonic instabilities associated with VA-CC, motivating the need for a more physically interpretable understanding of their origin. This letter identifies a delay-independent structural mechanism of harmonic instability in the VA-CC scheme, wherein the interaction between the filter and virtual inductances introduces a non-passive second-order transfer-function term exhibiting negative resistance. To address this issue, a simple yet effective modification is proposed by integrating a parallel virtual resistor into the VA structure. This reconfiguration enhances the passivity of VA-CC scheme across the harmonic range by mimicking the skin effect which augments damping in high-frequency range, without altering the wellestablished current controller or voltage feedforward control. Experimental results validate that the proposed method achieves robust harmonic stability, whereas the conventional approach fails under identical grid conditions.