Emulating Rotational Inertia of Synchronous Machines by a New Control Technique in Grid-Interactive Converters

Integration of renewable energy sources (RESs) into power systems is growing due to eco-friendly concerns and ever-increasing electricity demand. Voltage source converters (VSCs) are the main interface between RESs and power grids, which have neither rotational inertia nor damping characteristics. Lack of these metrics make the power grid sensitive to frequency disturbances and thereby under frequency, to load shedding activation or even large-scale collapse. In this regard, the contribution of this paper is to develop a new control technique for VSCs that can provide virtual inertia and damping properties with the DC-link capacitors inhered in the DC-side of grid-tied VSCs. The applied VSC is controlled in the current controlled model, with the capability of injecting extra active power with the aim of frequency support during perturbations. The dynamics assessment of the proposed platform is derived in detail. It is revealed that the control scheme performs in a stable region even under weak-grid conditions. Finally, simulations are conducted in MATLAB to depict the efficacy and feasibility of the proposed method. The results show that frequency deviation is mitigated under step up/down changes in the demand, and the rate of change of frequency is improved by 47.37% compared to the case in which the synthetic inertia loop is canceled out.