WHEN: Monday, February 21, 2022, 4:00 – 4:50 p.m., Zoom (contact rsmth@illinois for details)
SPEAKER: Siddhartha Nigam, Electrical and Computer Engineering, UIUC
TITLE: "Verification and Validation of Microgrid Control Architectures on a Controller Hardware in the Loop Testbed"
ABSTRACT: The continuing growth in the implementation of microgrids with deeper penetrations of integrated distributed energy resources, such as solar PV and energy storage, has intensified the interest in the utilization of advances in control technology and their deployment in appropriate architectures in microgrid applications. An important consideration is the selection of the architectures for control functions to implement the desired control strategies – be they of a centralized, decentralized, or a distributed nature. In this presentation, we describe our work on the verification and validation of such microgrid control architectures on a controller hardware-in-the-loop (C-HIL) testbed. We present an overview of the required control functions for the microgrid grid-connected and the islanded operations. We describe the salient features of the Illinois C-HIL testbed constructed for the performance of the microgrid control architecture verification and validation efforts. We discuss he centralized and the distributed implementation of each individual microgrid control function and examine the challenges that needed to be addressed in the integration of the various microgrid control functions under a centralized architecture. We provide representative results for the centralized and distributed control architectures on the C-HIL testbed and discuss the insights on their respective performance obtained from our testing efforts.
