Australasian Universities Power Engineering Conference, AUPEC 2014, Curtin University, Perth, Australia, 28 September 1 October 2014

Autonomous Micro-grid Operation by Employing

Weak Droop Control and PQ Control
Haichuan Niu, Meng Jiang, Daming Zhang and John Fletcher
School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications
University of New South Wales
NSW, Sydney, Australia, 2052

Abstract- This paper presents an autonomous operation of a microgrid by employing a droop control and PQ control strategy. The
local distributed generation (DG) is modeled by a grid-tied inverter
with LCL filter. A proportional-resonant controller is adopted to
control the inverter. A new control scheme based on a combination
of weak droop control and PQ control is proposed in this paper.
Droop control aims to share the load change after islanding occurs.
Meanwhile, weak droop control equations with a small powerdependent variation are used for generating the reference signal for
PQ control after islanding has occurred. These are implemented
using code in the Simulink environment. The simulations show that
the proposed scheme which combines droop control with PQ
control could operates well in both grid-connected and islanded
conditions. By employing such a scheme the transition of the microgrid from grid-connected operation to autonomous operation or
vice versa is smooth.
KeywordsDroop control, PQ control, Autonomous operation, PR controller, No gap transformer

others may employ PQ control before islanding and droop control

after islanding. For such DGs, the droop control could generate a
reference signal in order to control their output voltage and
frequency after islanding occurrence.
In this paper, the control of micro-grid system is based on a
combination of PQ control and modified or weak droop control
by adopting small droop control coefficients. Such modified
droop control can ensure very small deviation of system
frequency from rated value. It has been successfully implemented
in Matlab Simulink platform. The approach taken here is to use
code based method, which is closer to microcontroller or DSP
implementation.
The paper is organized as follows: Section II presents the
overall system under study; Section III presents overall system
with droop control and PQ control schemes for operating the
microgrid under both grid-connected mode and islanded mode.
Section IV concludes the paper.
II.

I.

INTRODUCTION

Integration of distributed generations is a significant part of a

micro-grid in order to provide a stable, reliable and efficient
multiple sources of paralleled system [1]. The present research in
micro-grids adopts control approaches that could be imbedded as
autonomous parts of each distributed generator. This model could
realize plugging additional DGs without stopping/restarting the
system. This model could also eliminate the complex central
controller and telecommunication facilities [2]. In a micro-grid
with peer-to-peer de-centralized model, PQ control and droop
control are always employed together. When islanding occurs,
each DG with droop control could share the change in power by
adjusting their output voltage and frequency if loads are varying,
which could make the micro-grid establish the new steady-state
operating point to balance power demand and power generation.
Meanwhile, droop control could operate at grid-connected
condition and islanding condition without a change in control
strategy, which could realize a smooth transition from gridconnected mode to islanded mode. Also, in a peer-to-peer decentralized micro-grid, some DGs employ PQ control while

WEAK DROOP CONTROL STRATEGY AND REAL

POWER/REACTIVE POWER CONTROL
STRATEGY

A. Droop control
Inverter droop control mimics the P-f (real power versus
frequency) and Q-V (reactive power versus voltage) features of
conventional synchronous generator to control the voltage and
frequency of the DG in order to control the output real power and
reactive power. Figure 1 shows the equivalent circuit of two
inverters connected in parallel.

Fig.1 Equivalent circuit of two inverters connected

Australasian Universities Power Engineering Conference, AUPEC 2014, Curtin University, Perth, Australia, 28 September 1 October 2014

In Figure 1, as the terminal voltage vectors of line impedances

are defined based on the phasor representation (
,
,
), the power flow through the line impedance
,
) can be expressed as
(
(1)
And
(2)
The x=1,2 means two branches in the equivalent circuit, and
represents the phase angle difference between the terminal
voltage vector of and . If the line impedance is modeled as
inductive and lossless, the resulting power flow is given as [3]:
(3)
,

By choosing proper coefficients kp and kv in (5) and (6), the

system can work as expected. As the chosen kp takes quite small
value in this research, such droop control is tagged as weak droop
control. One set of values adopted are kp=1.5E-6; kv=8.82E-7 for
the rated inverter power of 30kW.
The detailed diagram of the droop control used in this paper
is shown in Fig. 3.
B. Real power/ Reactive power Control
For real power/reactive power control strategy (PQ control)
adopted for each inverter, the scheme that is used to produce
reference current is shown in Fig. 4.

vg

abc

And
(4)

These are the basis of the conventional P-f droop and Q-V
droop control. The real power depends on and reactive power is
related to inverter output voltage. can be controlled by
frequency. Therefore, real power and reactive power could be
controlled independently by adjusting the inverter output
frequency and output voltage magnitude. As a result, the P-f
droop characteristic curve and the Q-V droop characteristic curve
could be drawn as the Fig. 2 [4].
From Fig. 2, one can get the droop control equations as
follows:
(5)
= 0 k p P

E = E0 k v Q

kp

(6)

E0
E

E
Q

kv

(a)
(b)
Fig. 2. Droop characteristic curve: (a) Frequency versus active power
Voltage versus reactive power

(b)

v gd

v gq

f
Vg

vgd
1
2
2
vgd
+ v gq
vgq

id*

v gq P
vgd Q

iq*

abc

ia*,b,c

dq

Fig. 4. PQ control scheme

id*
vgd
1
* = 2
2
iq vgd + v gq vgq
i* cos
*=
i sin

v gq P
v gd Q

(7)

sin id*

cos iq*

(8)

0
1
ia*
*

i
*
i
2
3
1
2
3
2
=

(9)

i*

1 2 3 2
ic*

The proportional resonant controller as given by (10) is

implemented for controlling the inverter in Fig. 3.

Ki s
K p + s2 + 2
0

( abc )
0
GPR ( s ) =

0
Kp +

Ki s
s 2 + 02
0

Ki s
Kp + 2

s + 02
0

(10)

Open-loop transfer function of VSI inverter with LCL filter is

given by (11).
Gc ( s ) K
Gol ( s) =
(11)
A1 + A2 + A3
where
A1 = ( L1S + R1 ) ( L2 s + R2 ) C1s

A2 = K C1s ( L2 s + R2 )
A3 = ( L1S + R1 ) + ( L2 s + R2 )
Closed-loop transfer function is given by (12)
(12)
Fig. 3. Droop control scheme under study

Figure 5 shows the overall control scheme of individual

inverter while Fig. 6 shows bode plots of (11) and (12). Open-

Australasian Universities Power Engineering Conference, AUPEC 2014, Curtin University, Perth, Australia, 28 September 1 October 2014

loop bode plot in Fig. 6 shows that at 50Hz or 314.159 rad/s, the
gain is very large; correspondingly at the same frequency, the
closed-loop bode plot has a gain of 1, which indicates almost
zero steady-state error. This is one of the main advantages of
using proportional resonant controller.
The parameters used in the modeling are as follows
VDC=700V; sampling time is Ts=1E-05s; Switching frequency is
10kHz; L1=6.5mH, L2=1.5E-03H, C= 5E-06F. To have a stable
control, the chosen controller parameters are Kp=0.5, Ki=50,
K=40. The line-to-line voltage of the AC source is 415V.

Fig. 5. Control scheme for the proposed inverter with LCL filter

Figure 7 shows that the reference voltage is obtained from the

point of common coupling (PCC) before islanding occurrence.
After islanding happens, the reference signal is generated by
droop equation block. So, this method in this paper overcomes
the issue that the PQ control could not be operated in islanding
condition due to no reference signal.
III.
OVERALL SYSTEM
The overall system is shown in Fig. 8 below, which consists
of three DGs and power grid. Each DG contains a full-bridge
three-phase inverter, LCL filter and local load. It is found that
such topology and proportional resonant controller based
algorithm can meet demands on dynamic change of real and
reactive power injection into the grid. In the meantime the
harmonic injection into the grid can be contained to meet the
requirement of harmonic standards.

Fig. 8. Overall system under study

IV.
RESULTS
The simulation parameters are given in Table I. In this
system, DG1 employs PQ control before islanding but droop
control strategy after islanding happens, while DG2 and DG3
employ the PQ control strategy both before and after islanding.
The simulation only considers the real power with reactive power
from each DG set to 0. The simulation results are shown in Fig. 9
through Fig. 15.
T ABLE I S IMULATION PARAMETERS

Fig. 6. Bold plot of the designed controller: Above-Open loop by Eqn (2) and
Below-Closed loop by Eqn (3).

Simulation
1
DG1
DG2
DG3

Inverter rated
power
30kW
30kW
30kW

Load
30kW
30kW
20kW

Islanding
occurs at
0.5s

Fig. 9 illustrates the swing grid current, which is zero after

0.5s. This is an indication that islanding happens.
Figure 10 shows inverter 1 output current, load 1 current and
load 1 voltage; one can see that output current of inverter 1
changes drastically. This is because inverter 1 adopts droop
control after islanding happens. As the total load demand is
80kW, 10kW less than that of 90kW generated by three DGs
before islanding happens, inverter 1 adjusts effectively to balance
the power supply with power demand. Zoomed-in Fig. 10 is
shown in Fig. 11.
Fig. 7. PQ control scheme under study

Australasian Universities Power Engineering Conference, AUPEC 2014, Curtin University, Perth, Australia, 28 September 1 October 2014

Fig. 9. Current from swing grid before and after islanding

Fig. 10. Inverter 1 output current, load 1 current and load 1 voltage

generates 30kW due to its PQ control. But DG1 generates 20kW

and its local load is 30kW. A shortage of 10kW is fed from DG3
to load 1 close to DG1. System frequency of load voltage is
shown in Fig. 17, from which one can see that all voltage
frequencies fluctuate small and are able to keep steady after
islanding.

Fig. 12. Inverter 2 output current, load 2 current and load 2 voltage

Fig. 13. Zoomed-in of Fig. 12

Fig. 11. Zoomed-in of Fig. 10

Fig. 12 shows the inverter 2 output current, load 2 current and

load 2 voltage; one can see that the inverter output current is
almost unchanged after islanding happens. The current and
voltage of load 2 keeps steady as well. Zoomed-in figure of Fig.
12 is shown in Fig. 13, from which one can see that the distortion
during transition from grid-connected mode to islanding mode is
very small. This is because DG 2 employs PQ control strategy,
which is expected to generate rated real power and reactive
power and does not participate in sharing power change. PQ
control is also adopted by DG 3. The results of DG3 are shown in
Figs. 14 and 15, from which one can see that there is almost no
change after islanding happens.
Figure 16 shows that powers of all three inverters are at their
rated power before islanding occurrence. The power of inverter 1
decreases after islanding happened in order to balance power
demand with power generation in the autonomous operation. As
inverter 1 adopts droop control, it can output the right amount of
power to establish power balance in the overall system, that is
power demand equals power generation. The powers of inverter
2 and inverter 3 maintain at their rated power. After the
islanding transition, one can see from Fig. 16 that DG3 still

Fig. 14. Inverter 3 output current, load 3 current and load 3 voltage

Australasian Universities Power Engineering Conference, AUPEC 2014, Curtin University, Perth, Australia, 28 September 1 October 2014

droop control after islanding, the other two being adopting PQ

control both before and after islanding happens. The proposed
method could reach no-gap transition before and after islanding
occurrence. The whole system is implemented in Simulink
environment based on the code approach, which can be
transformed for use in microcontroller and DSP.
REFERENCES
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Fig. 15. Zoomed-in of Fig. 14
[3]

[4]

[5]

[6]
[7]

Fig. 16 Generated power of inverter 1, inverter 2 and inverter 3

Fig. 17 System frequency of load voltage

V.

CONCLUSION

In this paper a combination of weak droop control strategy

with PQ control strategy is adopted for realizing autonomous
operation of micro-grid. Totally there are three DGs, one being
adopting PQ control before islanding happens and adopting weak

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