International Journal of Advanced Engineering Research and Technology (IJAERT) 190

Volume 4 Issue 5, May 2016, ISSN No.: 2348 8190

An Advanced MPC based Grid Current Compensator for Grid-Connected

Distributed Generation
Hashima Mohammed.M*, Dona Jose**
*M. Tech IV Sem., Dept of EEE, Al-Ameen Engineering College, Calicut University, Kerala
**Assistant Professor, Dept of EEE, Al Ameen Engineering College, Calicut University, Kerala
th

ABSTRACT
In distributed generation Systems, the harmonics are
usually high due to the nonlinear loads used by the
consumers and this highly distorted current should not be
fed directly to the utility grid as it will imbalance the
entire power system operations. To avoid this problem
filters are used with some strategies. This paper deals with
an advanced current control strategy based on MPC
(model predictive control) for the grid connected
operations of distributed generations under non-linear
loads and grid voltage distortions. The proposed method
has current controller composed of MPC along with PI.
which is designed in synchronous dq reference frame (dqsrf). More over the proposed technique does not need any
sensors for measurement of harmonic analysis of grid
voltage and as well as harmonics are removed to the
maximum extent. Hence this can be easily adopted in any
distributed generation. The operation principle of
proposed current controller is validated using MATLAB
SIMULINK.
Keywords: Distributed generation, model predictive
control, nonlinear loads, Voltage distortion.

I.

INTRODUCTION

In recent decades the use of renewable energy resources

such as wind turbines, photo voltaic cells and fuel cells
are increased considerably to address concerns about the
global energy crisis, depletion of fossil fuels, and
environmental pollution problems. This have been led to
the integration of Large no of renewable energy sources
within power distribution systems which resulted in
distributed generation .The DG system is always selected
over Traditional Power generation because of its low
cost, reduced size, high efficiency and provides a clean
electric power generation. The DG system which is
operating in a grid connected mode extracts maximum
available power from the energy source and transfer it to
the utility grid [1]. The DG can be operated with or
without local loads, where with a local load DG transfer
power to the utility grid. In both methods DG aims to
supply a high quality grid current to the utility grid with a

total harmonic distortion (THD) below 5% as per

IEEE1547 standards. To produce a high quality grid
current, various current control strategies are introduced,
such as hysteresis, proportional-integral (PI), and
proportional-resonant (PR) controllers but these current
controllers are only effective when the grid voltage is
balanced and sinusoidal. On the contrary due to the
popular use of nonlinear loads such as diode rectifiers
and adjustable-speed AC motor drives in the power
systems, the grid voltage at PCC (point of common
coupling) is typically not pure sinusoidal, instead they
can be unbalanced or distorted. These abnormal grid
voltage conditions can strongly deteriorate the
performance of the regulating grid current. In [2],[3] and
[4] several compensation methods are introduced to
reduce the harmonics and thereby improve grid current
quality but these all may increase the complexity of the
system. The repetitive control technique has been
adopted in [5]. A repetitive controller (RC) serves as a
bank of resonant controllers to compensate a large
number of harmonic components. However, despite the
effectiveness of the RC in harmonic compensation, RC
has a long delay time, which limits the dynamic response
of the current controller.
This paper proposes an advanced current control strategy
for the grid-connected DG System, which makes the grid
current sinusoidal by eliminating the effects of nonlinear
local load and grid voltage distortions. The control
method does not demand any harmonic analysis method
of the grid voltage. So the control method can be easily
adopted into the traditional DG system without the
installation of extra hardware. Here first the influence of
nonlinear local load and the grid voltage distortions on
the grid current is determined and then, an advanced
control strategy is introduced to control those issues.
In this paper, a control method called as model predictive
control (MPC) is used with PI for current regulation.
MPC describes a wide family of controllers. The
common elements of this kind of controller are that it
uses a model of the system which predicts the future
behavior of variables until a predefined horizon in time,
and then selection of the optimal actuations by
minimizing a cost function. The proposed current
controller is designed in d-q reference frame. The

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International Journal of Advanced Engineering Research and Technology (IJAERT) 191

Volume 4 Issue 5, May 2016, ISSN No.: 2348 8190

feasibility of the proposed control strategy is has been

verified by simulation results.

II. GRID VOLTAGE DISTORTION AND NON

LINEAR LOCAL LOAD

As
Fig.1 DG in grid connected mode
Fig: 1 shows the configuration of a three phase DG
operating in the grid connected mode. It mainly comprises
of a dc power source, a VSI (voltage-source inverter), an
output LC filter, local loads, and the utility grid. the DG
system supplies power to its local load and transfer the
extra power to the utility grid connected to the PCC. the
current that the DG transfers to grid (ig) should be
sinusoidal, balanced and have a low THD value for
providing a high quality current to the utility grid. Due to
the typical existence of grid voltage distortion and
nonlinear loads in the power system it is not easy to
satisfy these requirements. a detailed analysis on the
effects of grid voltage distortion and non linear loads are
explained in detail in [9].

The proposed control scheme is mainly consist of three

main parts, the PLL, the current reference generation
scheme, and the current controller. The PLL operation
under grid voltage distortion has been investigated in
detail in [6], therefore, it is not addressed in this paper.
Shown in Fig.2, the control strategy operates without any
harmonic voltage analysis of grid voltage. Therefore, it
can be developed without any additional hardware also it
can simultaneously address and eliminate effects of the
nonlinear load and distorted grid voltage on the grid
current quality.

3.1 Current Reference Generation

The current references can be generated for the current
controller in the dq reference frame as shown in Fig 2,
the current references are determined using (1) as below,

(1)
Where P* and Q* are the reference active and reactive
power, respectively; vgd represents the instantaneous
grid voltage in the dq frame; and
and
are the
direct and quadrature components of the grid current,
respectively.

3.2 Current Controller

III. PROPOSED CONTROL SCHEME

Fig.3 block diagram of current controller

Fig.2 Overall block diagram of the proposed control

strategy
For enhancing grid current quality, an advanced current
control strategy, as shown in Fig.2, is introduced. The
proposed system is developed in d-q reference frame.

An advanced current controller is proposed using

PI and MPC current controller. The main characteristic of
MPC is the use of a model of the system for predicting
the future behavior of the controlled variables. This
information is used by the controller to obtain optimal
actuation according to a predefined optimization
criterion. The criterion is expressed as a cost function to

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International Journal of Advanced Engineering Research and Technology (IJAERT) 192

Volume 4 Issue 5, May 2016, ISSN No.: 2348 8190

be minimized. The block diagram for a model predictive

control is shown in figure 3.where iref represents
reference current for the predictive controller i(k) is the
current measured at time k. i(k+1) is the value obtained
from the predicted current of m states for all possible n
switching states at time k+1.The difference between the
referenced and predicted values are then minimized by
using cost function.

g=|i*(k+1)-i(k+1)|

(2)

This minimizes the no. of switching states and optimizes

switching signal. Difference between the measured
current and reference current at which the minimum error
obtained will be the optimum value, that voltage vector is
selected and the corresponding switching state is outed. a
detailed study on model predictive control is given in [7]
and [8].
TABLE I
System Parameters
Parameters
values
Grid voltage
240 v
Grid frequency
50Hz
Rated output power
5KW
DC-link voltage(Vdc)
350 v
Sampling/Switching frequency
9KHz
Load of three-phase diode rectifier R=30
C=2200F
Three Phase linear load
P=5kw

IV. SIMULATION RESULTS

The simulation model of DG system is built by MATLAB
SIMULINK to verify the effectiveness of proposed
control method. The system parameters are given in table
I in simulation three cases are taken into account
1) Case I: Sinusoidal grid voltage and the linear local load
is used.
2) Case II: Sinusoidal grid voltage and the nonlinear local
load is used.
3) Case III: distorted and the nonlinear local load is used.
In Cases I and II, the grid voltage is assumed as pure
sinusoidal waveform. In Case III, the distorted grid
voltage is supplied with the harmonic components i.e. 5th
and 7th harmonic. In all test cases, the reference grid
current is set at i gd = 10 A and i gq = 0,The control
performance of conventional PI and PI-RC
current
controllers are investigated and compared with that of

proposed current controller. In all test cases, the reference

grid current is set at i gd =10A and i gq = 0, and the
conventional PI current controller and the proposed
current controller are investigated to compare their
control performances. Fig 4 depicts the steady-state
performance of grid connected DG using the
conventional PI controller, in which the waveforms of
grid voltage (vg), grid current (ig), local load current (iL),
and DG current (iDG) are plotted. As shown in Fig. 4,
the PI current controller is able to offer a good
performance only in Case I, where the grid voltage is
ideally sinusoidal and the local load is linear. In other
circumstances, due to the effect of the distorted grid
voltage and nonlinear local load, the PI controller is
unable to transfer a sinusoidal grid current into the utility
grid. In fact, because of popular use of nonlinear loads in
the DG local load, the ideally sinusoidal condition of the
grid voltage is very rare. There are the conditions given
in Cases II and III frequently occurs in practice. As a
result, the conventional PI current controller is
insufficient to offer a good quality grid current. Fig.5
shows the performance of DG system when connected to
a PI-RC current controller. by this method the THD is
reduced less than 5%.
For demonstration of the domination of proposed
current controller over traditional PI and PI-RC current
controllers, DG system with proposed current controller is
done for simulation, and the results are shown in Fig. 6.
As shown in the results, the proposed control method can
provide a good quality grid current or sinusoidal grid
currents despite of the distorted grid voltage and nonlinear
loads. Therefore, with the aid of the MPC in the proposed
current controller, distorted grid voltage and nonlinear
load current does not affect the grid current quality. The
proposed control method brings the THD of the grid
current to less than 1% in all cases, as given in Table II,
which completely complies with IEEE 1547 standards.

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(a)

International Journal of Advanced Engineering Research and Technology (IJAERT) 193

Volume 4 Issue 5, May 2016, ISSN No.: 2348 8190

(b)

(b)

(c)
Fig. 5. Simulation results with the PI-RC current controller: (a) Case
I; (b) Case II; and (c) Case III

(c)
Fig. 4. Simulation results with the PI current controller: (a) Case I; (b)
Case II; and (c) Case III.

(a)
(a)

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International Journal of Advanced Engineering Research and Technology (IJAERT) 194

Volume 4 Issue 5, May 2016, ISSN No.: 2348 8190

results show that the DG with the proposed current controller

transfers a sinusoidal current to the utility grid despite the
non linear loads and grid voltage distortions. The proposed
MPC control Provides Simple treatment of constraints and
easy inclusion of nonlinearities in the model and also
provides easy implementation of the controller. The
controller takes over the functions of PWM also. The
proposed current control scheme can be implemented without
the harmonic analysis of the grid voltage; therefore, it can be
easily integrated in the control scheme without installation of
extra hardware. The quality of grid current is improved and
also the THD value of the grid current is reduced
considerably compared with that obtained by using the
conventional current controller like PI and PI-RC. it
maintains a good quality grid current under non linear loads
and grid voltage distortions and decreases total harmonic
distortion (THD). Moreover, the dynamic response of the
grid current compensator was greatly enhanced as compared
with that of the traditional PI-RC topology.

(b)

REFERENCES

(c)
Fig. 6. Simulation results with proposed MPC current controller: (a)
Case I; (b) Case II; and (c) Case III

TABLE II
Summary Of THD Values Of Grid Current With PI,PI-RC
And Proposed Current Controller

These results evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed

control approach. The THD values are considerably reduced
in the proposed MPC method as compared to that of
conventional PI, and PI-RC methods.

V. CONCLUSION
The paper introduces an advanced current control strategy to
eliminate the effects of non linear load load and grid voltage
distortion in a grid connected DG system. The simulation

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