Phase Feedforward Damping Control Method for Virtual Synchronous Generators

Damping control plays an important role in suppressing the oscillation modes of virtual synchronous generators (VSGs). The most widely used damping control method through a frequency deviation feedback path is confronted with multiple challenging inherent contradictions among the different control objectives, resulting in seriously degraded control performance of VSGs. To resolve these contradictions fundamentally, this article proposes a novel phase feedforward damping (PFD) control method for VSG from the perspective of restructuring the damping controller. It replaces the traditional frequency deviation feedback path with a novel damping controller utilizing a phase feedforward path. Then, considering the grid-connected and islanding operation modes, respectively, a detailed comparative study of the traditional damping-based VSG (Tra-VSG) and the PFD-based VSG (PFD-VSG) is conducted. Both the theoretical and experimental results demonstrate convincingly that the proposed PFD control method can reconcile the different control objects of VSG, and thus, compared with Tra-VSG, PFD-VSG exhibits vastly superior response performance of the active power and the frequency in both grid-connected and islanding operation modes.