Grid-Forming Control with Assignable Voltage Regulation Guarantees and Safety-Critical Current Limiting

TL;DR

This paper introduces a nonlinear grid-forming controller with provable voltage regulation and safety-critical current limiting, using control barrier functions and disturbance suppression, without relying on detailed network parameters.

Contribution

It presents a novel GFM control framework that guarantees voltage formation and safety-critical current limits with provable stability, robustness, and minimal network knowledge.

Findings

Enhanced transient performance during current limiting

Faster recovery compared to PI-based control

Guaranteed boundedness and exponential decay of voltage errors

Abstract

This paper develops a nonlinear grid-forming (GFM) controller with provable voltage-formation guarantees, with over-current limiting enforced via a control-barrier-function (CBF)-based safety filter. The nominal controller follows a droop-based inner-outer architecture, in which voltage references and frequency are generated by droop laws, an outer-loop voltage controller produces current references using backstepping (BS), and an inner-loop current controller synthesizes the terminal voltage. The grid voltage is treated as an unknown bounded disturbance, without requiring knowledge of its bound, and the controller design does not rely on any network parameters beyond the point of common coupling (PCC). To robustify voltage formation against the grid voltage, a deadzone-adapted disturbance suppression (DADS) framework is incorporated, yielding practical voltage regulation characterized by asymptotic convergence of the PCC voltage errors to an assignably small and known residual set. Furthermore, the closed-loop system is proven to be globally well posed, with all physical and adaptive states bounded and voltage error transients (due to initial conditions) decaying exponentially at an assignable rate. On top of the nominal controller, hard over-current protection is achieved through a minimally invasive CBF-based safety filter that enforces strict current limits via a single-constraint quadratic program. The safety filter is compatible with any locally Lipschitz nominal controller. Rigorous analysis establishes forward invariance of the safe-current set and boundedness of all states under current limiting. Numerical results demonstrate improved transient performance and faster recovery during current-limiting events when the proposed DADS-BS controller is used as the nominal control law, compared with conventional PI-based GFM control.