LCL Resonance Analysis and Damping in Single-Loop Grid-Forming Wind Turbines
For wind turbine control engineers, this work reveals a previously unrecognized high-frequency instability in a widely used control scheme, enabling more robust damping design.
This paper identifies a novel instability mechanism in single-loop grid-forming wind turbines with droop-I reactive power control, causing open-loop unstable poles at high frequencies and reduced stability margins. An active damping design is proposed and validated experimentally.
A common assumption in both grid-following (GFL) and grid-forming (GFM) control systems is that they are open-loop (OL) stable in the vicinity of high-frequency resonances. Hence classical loop-shaping approaches are often used for establishing stability margins and designing active damping (AD) strategies. This paper shows that single-loop GFM (SL-GFM) control schemes incorporating a widely used class of reactive power (RAP) control, referred to as droop-I control, can lead to OL unstable poles. This finding reveals a novel instability mechanism resulting in a reduced stability margin and robustness at high frequencies. The sensitivity of this phenomenon to both RAP and electrical parameters is analyzed in detail. An AD design that explicitly accounts for the newly identified instability mechanism is proposed. We also provide a comparison between such SL-GFM and well-studied GFL control schemes, highlighting quite different resonance features between them. Validation is performed through experiments.