A new adaptive droop control strategy for improved power sharing accuracy and voltage restoration in a DC microgrid

In a DC Microgrid, accurate power sharing and voltage restoration are two primary control goals to guarantee power quality and reliable operation. Inaccurate power sharing is a significant concern due to discrepancies in feeder line resistance, faulty equipment, lack of monitoring and control, and nonlinear load. Moreover, inaccurate power sharing may lead to overloading of converters and cause a cascade of failures throughout the entire system. This study proposes a new adaptive droop control strategy to address these challenges. To enhance accurate power sharing, error current sharing is formulated by considering bus current and total rated current. This is regulated by the adaptive controller to adjust droop resistance. Additionally, the impact of droop voltage because of feeder line resistance is considered in the proposed strategy. The primary control loop regulates the output voltage of converter utilizing the proposed observer-based optimum sliding mode control (OOSMC). The controller gain of the OOSMC is optimized using a gradient-based method to enhance transient and steady state response of the converter output. In the secondary loop, the twin-delayed deep deterministic policy gradient (TD3) for voltage restoration is employed with a new reward function to optimally tune the proportional-integral (PI) controller. Finally, the superiority of the proposed strategy is evaluated through rigorous testing scenarios, including the use of constant power load (CPL) and sudden failure in the converters. Moreover, the proposed strategy is validated by simulations and laboratory-based experiments. The results show that the OOSMC outperforms GA and PSO while the TD3 has better performance than traditional PI. Furthermore, when the equivalent power-rated converters are implemented in the system, the proposed strategy can transfer identical power sharing of 4 W to the load and provide accurate current sharing of 0.167 A compared to conventional droop control while the DC bus voltage is maintained at the 24 V reference value. In the case of different power-rated converters, the proposed strategy can achieve power sharing accuracy. The first, second and third converters supply 2 W, 4 W, and 6 W, respectively, to the load and provide accurate current sharing. Meanwhile the DC bus voltage can be kept at the reference voltage of 24 V. In the scenario of various kinds of disturbances, the proposed strategy can achieve accurate power and current sharing when the system is tested under load and input voltage variations. Meanwhile the DC bus voltage always returns to the voltage reference. Moreover, the proposed strategy can share power and current accurately when the converter occurs a sudden failure.