Jae-Jung Jung

Neethu Sajeev, Stephen Arinze Obi, Jae-Jung Jung

Reliable fault recovery of grid-forming (GFM) converters under current-limited conditions is increasingly important as inverter-based resources replace synchronous generation. Existing current-limiting strategies primarily focus on current-angle regulation and synchronization trajectory shaping, while the interaction between the current limiter and the voltage control structure remains insufficiently understood. Consequently, post-fault recovery may exhibit converter trapping in current-limited control (CLC) or oscillatory transitions between CLC and constant voltage control (CVC). This paper shows that, under conventional PI-based voltage control, the interaction between the voltage controller and the current limiter creates a moving recovery boundary that contributes to these recovery failures. To address this issue, a post-fault recovery framework is proposed that combines structurally decoupled virtual admittance voltage control with current-angle steering. The proposed framework simultaneously improves synchronization trajectory evolution and stabilizes the recovery boundary during fault recovery. Experimental validation on a 3-kVA GFM inverter prototype confirms reliable post-fault synchronization recovery under both symmetrical and unsymmetrical voltage sag conditions, with trapping and oscillatory CLC-CVC transitions eliminated.

Stephen Arinze Obi, Ki-Hyun Kim, Jae-Jung Jung

Virtual admittance (VA) is widely used in cascaded voltage-control and current-control (VC-CC) grid-forming inverters (GFMIs) because it shapes the converter terminal behavior while preserving the current-regulation path required for current shaping and limiting. However, the achievable VC-loop bandwidth remains strongly coupled to the CC-loop bandwidth and to the VA parameters. Voltage-feedback decoupling (VFD) is commonly used to relax this coupling, but in VA-based control its benefit is not unconditional. This paper shows that unity-gain VFD, which represents the full-decoupling condition, removes the low-frequency restoring term associated with the filter capacitor and drives the voltage loop toward a delay-sensitive double-integrator structure. This internal-stability limitation is referred to here as the VFD trap. To address this trap without attenuating VFD, a proportional active-damping (AD) path is proposed, implemented as negative capacitor-voltage feedback in the current-reference path. The proposed path restores the missing low-frequency support while retaining unity VFD and introduces an additional AD-based degree of freedom for VC-loop tuning. A minimum support condition, a delay-aware phase-margin expression, and compact forward/inverse design equations are derived for operating-point selection. Standalone and grid-connected experiments on a 3-kVA prototype verify the analysis, showing that the proposed path recovers stable unity-VFD operation, reduces the voltage-step settling time from approximately 9~ms to 3~ms, and maintains stable power injection.

Jaekeun Lee, Minwoo Jeong, Jae-Jung Jung et al.

This paper addresses the harmonic instability problem of the virtual-admittance (VA)-based grid-forming control. It is revealed that the intra-loop coupling among the VA control, the inner-loop current control, and the voltage feedforward control results in an \(s^2\)-term in the equivalent output impedance of the inverter, which induces a negative-resistance property in the harmonic range. It is worth highlighting that this negative resistance is independent of the control delay. Consequently, this harmonic instability mechanism is fundamentally different from the extensively investigated cases in the literature, which are induced by the digital control delay of inverters. Then, a simple passivity-oriented damping control is proposed to mitigate the negative resistance arising from the intra-loop coupling. The method fully retains the well-established current controller and voltage feedforward, and does not require grid impedance information. Finally, experimental tests verify the theoretical findings and the effectiveness of the damping method.