Abstract

In a DC-microgrid (DC-MG) composed of a power accumulator battery test system (PABTS), owing to the low inertia of DC capacitance, the charging and discharging of a PABTS can easily cause DC-link voltage fluctuations, which may jeopardize the system stability. Hence, a virtual inertia control (VIC) strategy is proposed to suppress these fluctuations and enhance the stability of the DC-MG. The VIC method is realized in a bidirectional grid-connected converter (BGCC), which combines VIC and model predictive control (MPC). The proposed method can provide inertia support during the transient state and enhance the dynamic characteristics of the DC-link voltage. A prediction model is established that uses the variation range of the DC-link voltage as the constraint, and the output of VIC as well as voltage deviations as optimization objectives. The desired DC-link current increment is calculated using the prediction model to change the input DC current reference of the VIC. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) experiments are performed, and the results indicate that MPC-VIC is superior to the existing VIC methods in terms of inertia support and the DC-link voltage variation suppression of PABTS DC-MGs.