Date of Award

2018

Document Type

Open Access Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy in Electrical Engineering (PhD)

Administrative Home Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Advisor 1

Wayne W. Weaver

Committee Member 1

Lucia Gauchia

Committee Member 2

Gordon G. Parker

Committee Member 3

Sumit Paudyal

Committee Member 4

Rush D. Robinett

Committee Member 5

Daniel R. Fuhrmann

Abstract

Microgrid structures allow for more efficient utilization of renewable resources as well as autonomous operation. Ideally, a centralized controller would be available to allow for an optimizer to take all components into account so that they may collaboratively work towards a shared goal. To this end, a centralized optimization method was developed called the squared slack interior point method. The novelty of this method is that it incorporates the fraction to bound rule to alleviate the known ill-conditioning introduced by utilizing squared slack variables to handle inequality constraints. In addition, this method also allows for inequality constraint violations to be quantified in the same manner that equality constraints are quantified. The proposed method is found to quickly and accurately calculate the optimal power flow and reject solutions that violate the inequality constraints beyond some specified tolerance.

Where centralized information is not available, a decentralized method is required. In this method, constrained game theoretical optimization is utilized. However, due to unknown information about remote loads, inconsistent solution among players result in overloaded generators. To alleviate this issue, two perturbation methods are introduced. The first is overload feedback and the second is the perturb and observe squeeze method. In both methods, the goal is to adjust voltage angles and magnitudes to locally manage generator output. Both methods are found to rapidly drive overloaded sources back within their desired tolerances. Moreover, the game theoretical approach is found to have poor performance in the absence of shared load information among players. It is determined that the localized optimizers should be removed to reduce cost and that the operating condition should be perturb starting from the most recently available power flow calculation or starting from the nominal value.

Also, to manage voltage stability in the absence of communication, a Hamiltonian approach is implemented for the voltage source rectifier. This approach resulted in a highly stable voltage and a fast response to large step changes. The method was able to maintain the reference dc output at unity power factor while not requiring any information about loading or interconnection.

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