Sid Bhela of Siemens Technology

Inverter-dominated microgrids are quickly becoming a key building block of future power systems. They rely on centralized controllers that can provide reliability and resiliency in extreme events. Nonetheless, communication failures due to cyber-physical attacks or natural disasters can make the autonomous operation of islanded microgrids challenging. This talk examines a unified decentralized secondary control scheme that is robust to inverter clock synchronization errors and can be seamlessly applied to grid-following or grid-forming control architectures. The proposed scheme overcomes the well-known stability problem that arises from the parallel operation of local integral controllers. Theoretical guarantees for stability are provided along with criteria to appropriately tune the secondary control gains to achieve good frequency regulation performance while ensuring fair power sharing. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated through simulations on a 5-bus microgrid with four grid-forming inverters.

Biography:

Dr. Siddharth Bhela is a Staff Scientist with Siemens Technology, in Princeton, NJ. He received his B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA. Dr. Bhela has 15+ years of experience in power systems with 8+ years of experience in power system modeling, optimization, and control. He is the author of numerous technical articles, conference publications, and technical reports. His research has been sponsored by DOE SETO and ARPA-E. He is also a licensed professional engineer in the state of Texas.

Address:United States